CHAPTER XIV 



GARDEN HARVEST 



Our garden harvest is beginning. It embraces 

 about twelve weeks, during which flowers, fruit, 

 and vegetables attain perfection and are more 

 plentiful than at any other time of year. Active 

 preparation during long autumn and winter months 

 leads up to this anxiously-awaited time ; spring 

 days of continuous seed-sowing, early summer 

 with its hoeing and weeding, all help towards what 

 is reaped. When leaves turn scarlet or drop, 

 brown and shrivelled, to the ground, then we know 

 that nothing remains of past garden glory, except 

 those emblems which we are able to dry or pre- 

 serve and bring to the house for use or ornament. 

 One of the most delicious reminders of summer 

 days is pot-pourri. 



The friends who come to stay with me are en- 

 ticed into this work of picking roses, and when they 

 are given Sussex trugs and told to fill them only 

 with the freshest flowers, those that show no sign 

 of decay about their petals, they look askance 

 upon me as a cold-blooded murderer. 



Experience teaches that where there are hedges 

 of old China roses, where pink Bourbons flourish, 

 it is helpful to them if all fully-opened flowers are 



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