150 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



fashioned favorites, the almost forgotten things with aro- 

 matic odors. She it is who has giant bushes of cabbage-roses, 

 blush-roses, moss-roses, the deliciously scented white-rose. 

 In her garden flourishes the heliotrope, carefully removed to a 

 south window through the winter. Wallflowers are there, 

 and fragrant evening stock, clove-pinks, and lavender, boy 

 love and sweet-fern. Her little bed of annuals represents 

 touch-me-nots and snapdragons, and zinnias and gillyflow- 

 ers, and she raises a puzzled eyebrow when you call them 

 Impatiens balsamina, Antirrhinum ma jus and Matthiola 

 annua. 



While these are worthy exponents of the noble art of gar- 

 dening and may their tribe increase, for we can never have 

 enough flowers in this sordid world I find myself at variance 

 with their principles. I am but a beggarly creature to the 

 lordly owners of ten thousand flowers of any single variety; I 

 am wholly lacking in esthetic appreciation of cut flowers to 

 her who crams every fireplace, table and mantle shelf with 

 her posies; I am a stingy miser to the openhanded, and an 

 indiscriminate vagabond in the floral world to the con- 

 servative grower of a few favorites. I scarcely know how 

 to defend my position against so many opponents, and I 

 dare not hope to make good my cause; yet this is where 

 I stand. 



- Once fairly launched on the catalogues, I had a consuming 

 desire to make the personal acquaintance of every kind of 

 hardy annual and perennial that I could obtain. Not that I 

 wanted to continue raising them all, but I could not know 

 them unless I grew them. Nor could I hope to accomplish 

 my task in a single summer; I had the remainder of my life 

 to pursue this fascinating question. Though I have bought 

 from fifty to a hundred new varieties each year, I have the 

 prospect of going on indefinitely. In short, my chief purpose 



