ioo Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



for covering the strawberry beds. One winter I used them 

 in great quantities, covering every bed deep with them, 

 after a heavy snow fall, and it proved the most disastrous 

 winter in my experience. The field mice got in, made nests 

 of the needles, subsisted on a mixed diet of resin from the 

 pine, larkspur crowns, iris leaves, the bark of shrubs. The 

 pine needles were gnawed off and strewn thick over the entire 

 garden. I may be reasoning from a false premise, but I 

 have laid my heavy losses that winter to the score of pine 

 boughs, as it was the only winter I ever was troubled with 

 mice, and the only time I ever used pine boughs to any extent. 

 Some plants are said to be benefited by a heavy mulch of 

 coal ashes, such as hollyhocks, larkspurs; but I notice this 

 advice proceeds from the vicinity of New York and New 

 Jersey where the winters are more open and trying to plant 

 life than they are in my region. In reviewing my various 

 experiments, I find the best results came from allowing a 

 thin layer of leaves to settle over the beds, as they were blown 

 about in the autumn, adding them where too thinly spread, 

 holding them in place by slender sticks or the stalks of tall 

 perennials, and after the first snow fall, which serves as a 

 blanket, I spread a very thin coating of strawy manure over 

 the snow. This gives a three-ply covering, each very slight, 

 but the protection is perfect as the snow does not melt under 

 the manure until early April, unless it rains. In the winter 

 of 1906- '07, the most severe on record, I did not lose a 

 single plant under this treatment. It cannot be depended 

 on save in regions where the snow lies deep all winter. How- 

 ever, it is not the actual cold that kills hardy things: it is the 

 unseasonable warm day that prematurely starts growth; and 

 anything that can prevent this, gives protection. In warmer 

 latitudes than mine people have great trouble in raising 

 young hollyhocks, perennial poppies and white larkspurs, 



