ii2 INDOOR GARDENS 



aspidistra, the sanseviera, the cyanophyllum, the marantas, and 

 many of the anthuriums have something beside mere brilliancy 

 of attire; they have some native refinement, dignity, charm, or 

 personality. The only wrong thing is to make foliage plants the 

 dominant feature of a greenhouse to substitute dress for soul. 

 If you are tired with the day's work, it will rest you to wander 

 silently among the gigantic shapes of the tropics. But there is no 

 spell of enchantment in a house dominated by rex begonias, for 

 they smack of the milliner's window at its worst. There is no 

 "universal element" in cheap variegated plants like Vinca major, 

 wandering jew, acalyphas, coleus, abutilons and what an English- 

 man would describe as "all that sort of rot." They do not feed 

 the soul. 



The soul, however, cannot be soaring all the time, and for 

 practical, every-day purposes the living-room type of greenhouse 

 may be the best. The oldest way of satisfying the craving to 

 live amid flowers in the winter is to have a conservatory, i. <?., a 

 living room to which plants in their perfect state are brought from 

 a greenhouse where they have been raised and whence they return 

 after their beauty is past. But a conservatory usually lacks the 

 sincerity and charm of a place in which every stage of a plant's 

 life is spent. And I can think of nothing duller than the respect- 

 able conservatories that one sees in America's greatest cities. 

 There is one in New York which a friend of mine calls " the morgue." 

 It has cold marble, walls, and contains not a solitary flower only 

 the regular florist's "truck," viz., rubber plants, Boston ferns, and 

 the commonest palms. These are estimable plants in their 

 way, but they are done to death and against walls of white 

 marble they stand out with almost funereal blackness. 



How much cheerier and inspiring is Mrs. Stewart's indoor 



