196 The American Flower Garden 



After all one's care bestowed on annuals, it gives positive pain 

 to witness their death, root and branch, with the first frost; 

 whereas the hardy herbaceous plants merely go to sleep in autumn 

 preparing for a more glorious resurrection in the spring. 

 Several weeks before the earliest annual is ready to open a bud 

 out of doors, the hardy garden is lovely with snowdrops and 

 crocuses, creeping phlox, myrtle, English daisies, pink and white 

 saxifrages, daffodils, sweet rocket, bleeding heart, lily-of-the- 

 valley, columbines, clove pinks, narcissus, peonies and iris, some 

 of which began to bloom before the last snowdrift melted. We 

 welcome them joyfully, like old friends returned. It is an event- 

 ful day when some pet plant pushes its way back to sight through 

 the lately frozen earth. If old flowers are kept cut, and no seed 

 is permitted to form, the well-regulated hardy garden will afford 

 a constant succession of bloom from the earliest snowdrop until 

 the Japanese anemone, chrysanthemum and Christmas rose finally 

 succumb to inexorable winter. 



Annuals are seemingly cheap because the seeds come in five- 

 cent packages, and few consider that they have to be annually 

 renewed or calculate the value of the time consumed in trans- 

 planting the seedlings from boxes or hotbeds to the open ground. 

 They leave the ground in autumn as bare as it was in spring, the 

 entire investment of money and labour having disappeared. But 

 long after the first frost some perennials bloom and others con- 

 tinue growing, even in winter, whenever the temperature rises; 

 and either by virtue of their own hardy constitutions, or of creeping 

 roots that will send forth new crowns in spring, or of self-sown 

 seeds, they all insure perpetuation and increase. 



Perennials are usually offered in the catalogues as well-grown 

 plants at a cost of from one dollar to three dollars or more a dozen ; 





