92 THE JOY OF GARDENS 



compensations. Every one who has a garden expects to 

 hear how the roses are doing keeping alive that pleasant 

 fiction that if we will we may have them and so we 

 may, if we shut our ambitions from the varieties that 

 belong to Provence and lands where it is ever summer 

 and always afternoon, without the rains of a dying year 

 and a winter of discontent. 



Our sweet peas are like girl graduates, pretty, dainty, 

 and youthful. They have come in rose time, and climbed 

 high on their screen, and their little bonnets look far 

 down the road. Cutting sweet peas before breakfast is a 

 real sweetener of the atmosphere before planning to 

 work, perchance to hunt stakes and tear strips of muslin 

 to tie up the tall dahlias and gladioli. Dahlias take 

 hours of coaxing, while the gladioli seem to consider life 

 an easy affair; yet the dahlia fancier would not give one 

 root for a dozen gladioli, and the devotee of gladioli 

 would laugh to scorn a devotion to dahlias. 



As we are denied glittering successes in roses, it is 

 within the power of a tactful gardener to transfer his 

 loves. Perchance when our back is turned on red spiders 

 and slugs to lavish affection on some hardier plant than 

 the rose, the pests themselves will travel along and meet 

 a Goliath lurking in unexplored vegetation. Or it may 

 be, if we let them alone they will find rumpled rose 

 leaves in their Capua, and a gourmand appetite will urge 

 them to anarchy and to devour one another. 



