246 GARDENING WITH BRAINS 'i? 



shoveling superfluous dollars into your vaults. 

 Start a garden next spring and in a few weeks I 

 guarantee you will have an interest in it which 

 soon will develop into a mania — a passion that 

 will keep you alive, busy, absorbed, enchanted. 

 It will add twenty years to your life. 



To get a foretaste of the joys awaiting you 

 next summer, go into some well-kept garden, 

 see the autumn flowers, the dahlias, asters, 

 hydrangeas, cosmoses, phloxes, gladioli, pan- 

 sies, and many others, and then pass on to the 

 rows of full-headed cabbage and salad plants, 

 the salsify — safe substitute for the sewage- 

 soaked oysters — ^the late carrots, beets, peas, the 

 scarlet runner and other pole beans, and, above 

 all, the corn and the pumpkins. I love to hide 

 in a corn field, watch the broad, long leaves 

 waving in the wind, and listen to their music. 

 John Muir, in his great book on the mountains 

 of California, dwells on a fact known only to 

 those whose senses have been trained — that the 

 leaves of different trees sound a music of their 

 own as recognizable as the calls and songs of 

 various birds. 



The cornstalk, too, has its own call to the 

 music lover. The pumpkin leaves are mute; 

 but the pumpkins themselves — how picturesque 

 they look between the cornstalks — green, yellow, 

 orange, white — ^big and doubling in size every 

 few days. And when I think of pumpkin pie — 

 genuine, home-made, I mean, not the kind you 



