THE HOPES AND JOYS OF GARDEN MAKING 13 



CHAPTER I 



THE HOPES AND JOYS OF GARDEN MAKING 



MY memory cannot reach to the time when I was not inter- 

 ested in gardens and garden making, and for this reason 

 these stray leaves from many gardens have been gathered from 

 year to year, and from many sections, and are presented here in 

 the hope that they may be an incentive to those who love growing 

 things either to gather in some new garden children and make 

 them so much at home that they will become not like adopted 

 little ones, but like one's very own, or to find out something new 

 about the habits of those they have grown up with and always 

 known. 



There are leaves in the garden book of memory that were 

 gathered in the sunshine of old Concord; there are others that 

 are woven into a Laurel wreath from the roads that wind among 

 those Fern-crowned hills that rise above the Hudson and are lost 

 in the misty distance of the Catskills; there are Palm branches 

 from New Orleans, and clusters of Azaleas from Charleston; 

 there are scarlet Trumpet Vine blossoms that cling to tall trees 

 along the bayous of Louisiana, and white Roses from the door- 

 yards of the Tennessee mountaineers, and everywhere there has 

 been beauty and sweetness and light, the gathering of them has 

 been a joy, the remembrance of them is an inspiration. 



In all my journeyings and observations it has seemed to me 

 that the different parallels of latitude simply meant different dates 

 for plantings. Short seasons of bloom, long seasons of rest in the 

 cooler belts; long seasons of bloom, short seasons of rest in the 

 warmer zones. 



