198 MY GROWING GARDEN 



Then the wallflowers, bless them! do not regard 

 winter as of any importance until at last Jack 

 Frost repeatedly freezes them into insensibility. 

 One year the ground was unfrozen when the first 

 deep December snow arrived, covering everything 

 with its soft mantle. There followed weeks of the 

 sharp steady cold of an ideal winter; but in Jan- 

 uary a thaw set in that in a day cut down the snow 

 blanket to a mere gauze .sheet. What was my sur- 

 prise to find that the sinking snow uncovered wall- 

 flowers that had seemingly opened their blooms 

 under it, and were in entire perfection when the 

 sun reached them ! 



And on Christmas day in one of the happy 

 Breeze Hill garden years I have found and gloat- 

 ingly taken to the home-guests that day assembled 

 flowers of the pansy, the English daisy and the 

 wallflower. These latest flowers are doubly appre- 

 ciated, and have an appeal not possessed by the 

 great rich greenhouse roses one buys. 



So long as the ground can be handled and 

 worked, we keep at it. Early in December I have 

 marked out, in prospect for next and later years, a 

 new walk across that part of the west garden last 

 devoted to a potato failure, and since under such 

 further amelioration of its soil as will give me 

 hope of accomplishing real gardening on it another 



