STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 93 



A LADIES' NIGHT. 



A WOMAN'S WORK IN FRUIT GROWING. 

 IviLLA M. Scales, Temple. 



In the good old days of our great grandmothers, a well 

 ordered garden was as necessary to their existence as the spin- 

 ning, knitting and weaving of wool and flax for the household. 

 What good dame thought of attending meeting of a Sunday 

 morning in summer without her bunch of clove pinks and 

 southernwood ! carefully gathered on Saturday and left out of 

 doors to keep fresh and sweet in the dew over night. 



In those quaint old gardens often bordered by hedges of 

 clipped box, grew lovely damask roses, bee larkspur, hollyhocks, 

 great clumps of purple lilacs, beds of sweet lavender for the 

 linen chest ; the kitchen herbs, too, grew there — -sage, summer 

 savory and the mints ; while in secluded corners were the 

 medicinal herbs, sweet clover, motherwort, the beautiful crimson 

 balm — simples to be gathered in mid-summer or they would lose 

 their healing virtue. 



Those gentlewomen were proud of the well kept rows of red 

 and white Dutch currants from which yearly were made dainty 

 jellies and preserves from famous receipts, which have been 

 carefully handed down to their descendants with the cherished 

 pewter and rare old china. Those fine old gardens were not left 

 entirely to the care of a gardener. In a recent magazine article 

 entitled " When Longfellow was a Portland Lad," the author 

 says, " Mrs. Zilpath Longfellow, the mother of Henry Wads- 

 worth Longfellow, was one of the garden loving dames, and 

 spring and summer was seen with a negro servant working 

 among her flowers. Sometimes, a little nankeen figure strayed 

 by her side — a dancing sprite that wandered off among the 

 flowerbeds and caused her to call chidingly, ' Henry, do not hurt 

 your mother's posies.' The great poet as an elderly man often 

 thought of his mother's garden in the Forest City, where the 

 robins and the bluebirds came back every spring to flit over 

 shrubs planted by her hands." 



