CHAPTER XI 



PERENNIALS FOR A THOUGHT-OUT GARDEN 



FLOWERING plants that live or perpetuate themselves 

 from year to year, giving one a high rate of com- 

 pound interest as their numbers and beauty naturally 

 increase, commend themselves to us more and more until, happily, 

 they are coming to be regarded again, as they were in our 

 grandmothers' day, as the very basis of a good garden. 

 We may be sure that pioneer gentlewomen, who were their own 

 gardeners chiefly, and who had to cook, churn, spin, weave 

 and sew by hand all the clothing for large families, nurse them 

 and dose them with home-made medicines, make quilts, 

 candles, wine, and a thousand other things which would stagger 

 the pampered modern woman, learned which plants rewarded 

 a minimum amount of care with a maximum amount of 

 flowers. A few moments snatched from multitudinous house- 

 hold cares from time to time sufficed to keep our grandmothers' 

 gardens gay from earliest spring to frost, and it is little wonder 

 that their favourites have stood the test of time. We still love 

 their peonies, hollyhocks, and phloxes. Some fraxinella in an 

 old New England garden has outlived great-grandmother, grand- 

 mother, mother and daughter. One plants perennials for beauty 

 that is permanent. They are for the affections, too. 



Compared with tender annuals, whose seeds must be sown 

 every spring, many of them indoors or under glass, their seed- 

 lings transplanted to the open ground at the busiest time of the 

 garden year, how refreshingly easy of culture the perennials are! 



