106 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



wild strawberry with the Belmont; or to come on to your own 

 ground, compare the common wild rose with your fine garden 

 roses the Sharman-Crawford, the Mrs. John Laing." 



" Mere hybrids all of them," I defended. " Man destroys 

 the balance utterly. He sacrifices everything to size and 

 color. We think them beautiful, but are they? Man is 

 blighting with his megalomania all fruits, increasingly beauti- 

 ful to look upon, but with less and less flavor. How about the 

 Ben Davis apple, the Keifer pear ? Man's flowers have color, 

 but no fragrance; size, but no fertility. A modern rose has no 

 seed; it has to be budded to be reproduced. Man sacrifices 

 all proportion to attain any given end, whether he breeds 

 poultry, cattle, fruits or flowers; he weakens the vitality and 

 makes them a prey to a thousand civilized pests. Do you 

 call that perfection ? But has not Nature herself provided the 

 peculiar condition that man merely seizes upon to exaggerate ? 

 If you call it utility I grant it. Man has learned to take an ac- 

 cidental sport of Nature, and by artificial means to reproduce 

 it. She furnishes both the sport and the man of wit to use it, 

 but the moment he relaxes his vigilance Hybrid Perpetual 

 roses revert to the manetti, the original stock upon which 

 they were budded; the suckers below the graft of Spitzen- 

 berg apples revert to wild stock; highly civilized nations are 

 becoming sterile." 



Adam is as little convinced by my defense as I am by his 

 arraignment. I find ample corroboration of his point of view 

 on every hand. Every where I come close to the defeats and 

 imperfect types that Nature casts aside as if they were broken 

 experimental molds, not quite adapted to her use of them as 

 final expressions or manifestations of Spirit; yet, when I close 

 my eyes to the outward form and meditate on the purpose of 

 creation, and Nature's ideals in her use of matter, I hear faith 

 singing low in my heart, and I know that all is well. 



