() F V I X K S 



summer; it is well named, its flowers are so honey sweet; and 

 sprawling over rose bush and spir&a, over the posts and flower- 

 boxes, climbing the house-walls in one snowy perfumed mantle, 

 is the Japanese clematis. 



It has recently been suggested that possibly plants have senses, 

 and perhaps they have. I know they have wills of their own, as 

 witness my experience with the fragile colnea vine. That first 

 summer in the big house when the window- boxes looked so bare, 

 I conceived the brilliant idea, as I thought, of planting in the front 

 of the boxes some cobrea, which should fall gracefully to the brick 

 floor, its purple bells all dangling, its curious seed-pods orna- 

 menting the terrace after the frost had blighted the leaves. The 

 cobtea was duly planted, and the first fresh shoots were carefully 

 tied down to the wood. I noticed that instead of hanging down, 

 they had a tendency to turn upward, frail as the stems were, but 

 I persisted. Inch by inch Madame Cobrea and I fought; her 

 aspirations pointed to the heavens, mine were sadly earthly. It 

 was a lesson to me in more ways than one. Madame Cobaja did 

 not give up the fight; no more did I. When she found she could 

 not rise, she did not die, she simply refused to grow at all, and the 

 entire summer passed without one flower on the cobjea vine and 

 only a few protesting leaves. 



T think perhaps the trumpet vine is our favorite one after all, 

 so splendidly rich in its graceful growth, so gorgeous its clusters 



of orange flowers, so fraught with promise its long beans filled 



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