OUR COUNTRY HOME 



blue variety to the pale lavender of the common wood aster with 

 its misty seed effects ; the wavy-leaf aster, its pale blue to violet rays 

 clustering about the yellow-turning-to-brown disks; the daisy-like 

 purple aster, and the smooth aster high in the dry woods with its 

 clasping, tapering leaves. The white and the tall white lettuce 

 stand sentinel-like along the roadways. One can almost hear the 

 tinkle of their tiny bells, nodding as the bees fly by. 



Shall I acknowledge that even the smartweed and the lady's- 

 thumb have a place in our collection, that the ridge-seeded spurge 

 makes a delicate covering for the ground where the eglantine lifts 

 high her thorny stalks, and that even the chickweed is permitted to 

 spread its carpet of dainty leaves under the sea-buckthorn bushes ? 



On the western boundary of the place the woods stop within 

 about one hundred and fifty feet of the shore, and here, where the 

 land dips down a little into a hollow, we planned a field of sun- 

 loving flora like the blue closed gentian, the turtle-head, the frag- 

 rant white fringed orchid, the old-fashioned butter-and-eggs, the 

 bouncing-bets, the dogbane, the wild bergamot, the white sanicle, 

 and her humble sister the boneset, the resin-weed, with all the 

 cone-flowers, and sunflowers, the heleniums and the heliopsis, 

 the wild asters in variety, and the milkweeds among the tall swampy 

 grasses. Here in some mysterious fashion appeared the downy 

 false foxglove and the fern-leaved and the tall wild lettuce with her 

 sister the red wood-lettuce, both of which so resemble the thistle in 



leaf that the first year I pulled them all up. The Maryland fig- 



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