OUR COUNTRY HO M E 



man. the Spanish, the English, the Japanese, with their wonderfully 

 varied combinations of purple and yellow and brown and white. 

 how indescribable they are! What impression could a blind per- 

 son get from the technical description of an iris? Take one of 

 the commoner species, the Sibirica: "Limb bright lilac blue: 

 outer segments one and one half to two inches long, with an orbic- 

 ular blade graduallv narrowed to a slender chnv. veined with 

 bright violet, whitish toward the claw: inner segments shorter, 

 erect." Could the inadequacy of language go further? In and 

 out of the grassy hollows, following the windings of the brook on 

 either side, these brilliant blossoms extend for about two hundred 

 feet. Over nine thousand bulbs and rhizomes were planted and 

 they increase from year to year. In our imagination vast field-; 

 of fleurs-de-lis stretch before us, and we stand in ecstasv amoii"- 







their gorgeous velvety blooms. 



On the north, where the brook makes a sudden turn, thick 

 plantations of sumac hide the gravel pit. This was once a hole 

 in the ground, the worst kind of a hole in the ground, one with 

 steep ragged edges, where the sand had fallen away from the root- 

 lets, leaving them to hang helplessly and move restlessly in the air. 

 A rutty, ugly road led into the pit from the main avenue, and the 

 water lay, a dismal pool, some six feet deep, over its muddy bottom. 

 We had taken over five thousand cubic yards of gravel and soil out of 

 this gravel pit, leaving an excavation about seventy by one lumdivd 

 and fifty feet, and about eighteen feet deep. We looked at it from 



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