io8 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



servative compared with it. The only thing to be done with 

 either the floral or human type is to keep it moving. They 

 best serve utility when not allowed to get thoroughly estab- 

 lished. Both destroy a large portion of the social fabric when 

 an effort is made to uproot them, for their ramifications are so 

 complete that they underlie many innocent victims. I rep- 

 resent a generous distributor of this unlawful wealth. I be- 

 stow not millions for plants have not evolved to that degree 

 of debasement but bushels of it on young struggling gar- 

 deners that need endowment, as I am determined to die poor 

 in daisies, heliotrope and hawkbit. Whenever I hear of a new 

 opportunity to play the generous benefactor, I unload my 

 surplus never quite able to impoverish myself, however. I 

 attach no condition that an equal amount shall be raised by 

 the recipient before the gift is forwarded. It is not that helio- 

 trope, Calystegia and daisies are not good nor dollars; it is 

 merely a question how much of a burden of plants or dollars 

 one can carry without inconvenience and impoverishment in 

 other directions. 



The pauper poor, with their irresponsibly prolific families, 

 are but the human form of those improvident plants that shed 

 their too fertile seed in every direction. If the population is 

 restricted in either case to a reasonable limit, where society 

 can provide for the children, they become excellent citizens. 

 Otherwise they are flung out on the cruel world without suit- 

 able provision, and either the mortality is great Nature's kind 

 and universal way of disposing of a surplus or both are forced 

 to emigrate to find lodging for the ever increasing hordes. My 

 orphanages, almshouses and foreign colonies are very shady 

 unsanitary spots down by a brook, also the sides of the lane, 

 where both diet and shelter are precarious, owing to the fact 

 that that corner of the world is a regular slum district, already 

 crowded with hungry trees and underbrush looking for work, 



