40 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1897. 



accomplish than gardening. Gardening is earnest work, it will not 

 do to poke here and push there, and putter around anyhow and any- 

 where, there must be thorough and well directed effort. 



The legend of the Cherokee Rose is as pretty as the flower itself. 

 An Indian chief of the Seminole tribe, taken prisoner of w-ar by his 

 enemies, the Cherokees, and doomed to torture, fell so seriously ill 

 that it became necessary to wait for his restoration to health before 

 committing him to the fire ; and as he lay prostrated by disease iu the 

 cabin of the Cherokee warrior, the daughter of the latter, a young 

 dark-faced maid, was his nurse. She fell in love with the young 

 chieftain and, wishing him to save his life, urged him to escape ; but 

 he would not do so unless she would flee with him. She consented. 

 Yet before she had gone far, impelled by soft regret at leaving her 

 home, she asked leave of her lover to return for the purpose of bear- 

 ing away some memento of it. So, retracing her footsteps, she broke 

 a sprig of the white rose which was climbing up the poles of her 

 father's tent, and preserving it during her flight through the wi'der- 

 ness, planted it by the door of her new home among the Semiuoles. 

 And from that day this beautiful flower has always been known, 

 between the capes of Florida, and throughout the Southern States, 

 by the name of the Cherokee Rose. 



It is of rapid growth, and soon forms a hedge as dense as it is 

 beautiful. It runs along the roadsides, likewise, converting roads 

 and fences into thick banks of leaves and flowers. It climbs to the 

 tops of high trees, hanging its festoons among the branches, or letting 

 them droop gracefully to the ground. In fact, this showy wild-flower, 

 with its five white petals and centre of gold, imbedded as it is in so 

 many brightly shining leaves of green, gives almost a bridal aspect 

 to the spring landscape, and well-nigh makes all the citizens' cottages 

 look like homes of the poets. Napoleon, when at St. Helena, formed 

 himself a garden ; it was square, and of about an acre in extent. 

 " Here," writes one who saw him in this inclosure, " in a flowered dress- 

 ing-gown, gx'een slippers, and his head bound round with a crimson 

 silk-handkerchief, may be found the once mighty emperor, wielding a 

 watering-pot, and working in the soil." It was a very kitchen garden, 

 in the most homely sense of the word ; and the genius that produced 

 such transcendent effects upon the plains of Austerlitz and Marengo, 

 seems to have served him but little in his encounters with earth and 

 stone. 



Better would it be if every cottage in the land had its garden plot, 

 and its " square" of good vegetables and good fruit. It is the same 



