Friendly Flowers 



cut them, except where it is patently for their 

 good. 



The best kinds of garden roses are not very 

 happy in my sandy soil, and until this summer 

 have withstood all my efforts to make them put 

 forth blooms sufficiently good to repay the labour 

 and care bestowed on them. They, and I, had 

 decided to part amicably, when there came a 

 sudden rapprochement. Without either of us know- 

 ing how, we suddenly understood each other. 

 They delighted to blossom in my company, and 

 I, in return, rushed enthusiastically ahead and 

 issued invitations to all their relatives and friends, 

 and distant cousins, who are neither relatives nor 

 friends, to come and join them. 



Ramblers, on the other hand, manage to live 

 triumphantly, and in two years a Dorothy Perkins 

 has clothed completely the tall trunk of a dead 

 apple-tree. 



Lilies and all their tribe flourish and wax great. 

 Delphiniums have prospered, even unto the tenth 

 generation, and from about twenty roots I have 

 now anything from two to three hundred, and 

 every autumn have to cast out a number. So 

 with larkspurs (the annual delphinium), and monks- 

 hood, which it is so difficult not to call aconite. . . . 

 It is pretended in favour of catalogue Latin that 



