120 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN 



will repay you tenfold for your care. I do not 

 know a more satisfactory plant, and I rejoice 

 in the attention bestowed by those whose efforts 

 to spread beauty may not be wholly unselfish, 

 but who are our benefactors none the less. 

 With the first warm stirrings of the heart of 

 April, the peonies will pierce the soil with 

 their strong wedges, whose upthrust tells of 

 a vigorous self-knowledge and a masterful 

 will. Then comes the wealth of foliage cut, 

 polished, grey, olive, bronze, which Miss Jeykll 

 likens to the amalgams of Japanese metal 

 workers. Thus does the peony prepare the 

 stage for the final effort upon which its thoughts 

 have been fixed from the beginning. The 

 little buds such marvels of adjustment and 

 economy of space grow into big hard balls, 

 which almost as a matter of course must have 

 suggested some such ideas as Mr William 

 Coles wrote down in his " Adam in Eden, or 

 the Paradise of Plants." "The peony," he 

 says, " having some signature and proportion 

 with the head of man, having sutures and little 

 veins dispersed up and down like unto those 

 which environ the brain, when the flowers blow, 

 they open an outward little skin representing 



