OF VINES 



training and pruning it makes a good screen and keeps green until 

 December. It flowers too, persistently, even if those flowers are 

 small and not pretty in color; they have a sort of faded futile look 

 about them, but their intention of welldoing should be recognized. 

 The bees certainly appreciate them. Curiously enough our vines 

 have never berried, but have kept on blossoming until after the 

 first frost. 



I wish some one would write an apotheosis to the kudzu vine, 

 that enterprising and willing worker, that vigorous and constant 

 grower which, starting out of the ground about the middle of May, 

 a weak and helpless shoot without tendrils or clasping leaf-stems, 

 under the least kindly encouragement in the way of staples or 

 string, bounds upward and onward over all obstacles, arriving 

 at the window ledge, reaching up to the awnings, and still not con- 

 tent until the roof be scaled and it can see what is beyond. I fully 

 expect, if the season were long enough, that it would drape my 

 tallest chimney with its ivy-like green leaves and hang its long, 

 straight, limp strands over the entire length of the house. For- 

 tunately, nature has so arranged it, in this climate at least, that it 

 dies to the ground at the first touch of frost. What it accomplishes 

 in its native haunts in Japan is beyond my imagination! I am 

 sure it must have been the kudzu vine which the Fairies planted 

 by the house of the Sleeping Beauty, " and it grew and grew and 

 covered the house, and still grew into a green tangle in the middle 



of the wood, reaching out its long fingers, twisting itself around any 



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