76 PACIFIC STATES FLORAL CONGRESS. 



healthful recreation from office and indoor duties; bringing him beauty 

 and fragrance, it sweetens life's burdens, it furnishes health-giving 

 exertion. The farmer and his family from the treeless plains and 

 mesas, from the vast monotony of the sun-staring wheat fields, also are 

 tenefited by the station gardens. 



I know from personal experience that the railway garden more 

 than once has furnished slips and encouragement to a young home 

 garden on San Joaquin farms where formerly the wheat grew up to 

 the front door, and where various trees have been planted because 

 "those of the same kind over at the depot were doing so well, and 

 looking so handsome." This must surely have given added pleasures to 

 the lives of these people, and what much better can any garden do ? 



But the railway garden is mainly planted for the sake of the trav- 

 eler, for the tourist, for the newcomer to our state. He is eager 

 for impressions of the new land, its capability, its availability and de- 

 sirability for home-making. As he travels along, stopping for a min- 

 ute or two at each station, he receives his first and most lasting impres- 

 sion from what he sees there. So the station garden shows him what 

 our mild winter, our cloudless summer can bring forth from our soils. 

 He recognizes, perhaps, old friends in a glowing bed of verbenas; but 

 the thrift, the spontaneity with which they grow, their brilliant pot- 

 pourri of sun-bathed color, are a revelation to him. 



Perhaps he travels west or south when the snow covers his home- 

 land, and the storms of winter rage there; and his first impression of 

 our southland comes again to him from our station gardens, where, in 

 December, the Gaznia weaves ribbons of gold in the rockeries; where 

 the palms and bamboos glisten with clean, rain- washed leaves; where 

 the orange, the pomelo, and the lemon hang heavy with golden fruit: 

 where the rose is abloom in midwinter, and the violet throws abroad 

 its delicious fragrance. The station garden serves as a permanent 

 decoration of festive welcome to the traveler to our state, and he accepts 

 it as such. What better way is there of advertising our state than by 

 laying out gardens along our far-reaching, iron-clad highways gardens 

 of semitropical beauty, such as the greater number of man dare only 

 dream of? 



It is probably with this in mind that the Santa Fe Eailway Com- 

 pany has planted a garden at every station depot and every section- 

 house along its lines in this state. There is not a section-house on their 

 Liforma lines, excepting, perhaps, some in the desert, which has not 

 ts garden with trees and palms, its well-fenced spot, where the house- 

 He can cultivate her favorite posies, where her children come under 

 health-giving and refining influence of flowers and rustling forest 

 leaves. 



