28 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



the same line, and taking out only a little earth at a time, suc- 

 ceed in doing with her own hands all the digging that can be 

 required in a small garden, the soil of which, if it has been in 

 long cultivation, can never be very hard or very difficult to 

 penetrate; and she will not only have the satisfaction of seeing 

 the garden created, as it were, by the labor of her own hands, 

 but she will find her health and spirits wonderfully improved 

 by the exercise, and by the reviving smell of the fresh earth." 

 Was ever hard labor so delicately sugar-coated ? with all my 

 errors of judgment I never took a homeopathic view of the 

 relation between earth and tools. 



I feel like a hoyden when I recall my energetic efforts, the 

 farm shovel, the pickax, the thirty-five-pound crowbar. I 

 have no extenuating "as it weres" in my record. It is a clear 

 and undeniable charge upon my past that I did actually 

 create my garden from a stone heap not from " land under 

 long cultivation." I am a barbaric Amazon; but what can be 

 expected of one with a probable Irish ancestor except a wild 

 outbreak of rude strength in unguarded moments, when 

 wrestling with virgin soil. 



Further: the lady's proper weapon is a spade "smooth, 

 sufficiently slender for a lady's hand to grasp, of close elastic 

 wood," only "tolerably strong" evidently no lady is ex- 

 pected to expend her precious strength, provided she has any, 

 on garden operations "one that shall penetrate the ground 

 with the least possible trouble." Still further : " A lady should 

 have a pair of stiff leathern gloves or gauntlets to protect her 

 hands not only from the handle of her spade, but from stones, 

 weeds, et cetera which she may turn over with the earth, and 

 which ought to be picked out and thrown into a small light 

 wheelbarrow which may be easily moved from place to place." 



Surely this picture of sweetness and light quite shames me. 

 This is the way true femininity conducts itself in the presence 



