46 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



its post each year, though it does not bloom it is said to take 

 seven years' residence in one spot for the wistaria to feel at 

 home, a grape-vine and Japanese wistaria are on the third 

 side. It is a perfect bower of green and proved a curious 

 stumbling-block to a strange urbanite, who found herself on 

 our hill one morning. She wanted to get away, and I was 

 anxious she should, as she came at a critical moment in my 

 affairs, when, if she had been an intimate friend, I should have 

 given her a good book, bidding her go sit under a green tree 

 and be happy until I was free. Being a stranger, she was 

 treated with more ceremony and less tolerance. 



"Isn't there a path down to the high road?" she inquired. 

 "There is," said I with ill-concealed satisfaction. "You go 

 down through the garden, and on through the orchard be- 

 yond, and you will find a turnstile in the wall just as you reach 

 the wood path." 



She seemed a bit confused perhaps she had once been lost 

 in a wood and felt a natural caution. She wanted me to re- 

 peat the directions; I did so, but she still stood uncertain. "I 

 am to go down through that path and under that" she 

 paused, extending a much bejewelled forefinger, her vocabu- 

 lary, gathered on the city pave, had no equivalent for a luscious 

 green arbor "That, ah that awning?" she interrogated. 



"Yes, go under the awning," I repeated, "and out through 

 the orchard you can't miss the turnstile." What this last 

 rural term meant to her mind I never learned. As no one was 

 reported missing in the woods, I presume she must have found 

 her way. 



My walks are covered with sand, for it does not track into 

 the house as the native soil would. Sand has another ad- 

 vantage; it serves as a seed bed for a multitude of self-sowing 

 plants. When I want a forcible hollyhock, lupine, canterbury 

 bell or columbine, or desire particularly strong annuals such 



