132 THE JOY OF GARDENS 



own sweet will, when reason tells us that if certain sturdy 

 plants do bloom, the chance which has made them fair to 

 look upon and caused them to flourish, without many 

 scars in the battle, is "direction which we cannot see," an 

 invisible fortunate circumstance. 



In a forgotten village in an Eastern mountain valley 

 was an old garden filled with what some call permanent 

 plants; that is, enduring perennials, self-seeding annuals, 

 and members of the lily tribe, reproducing their bulbs. 

 The broad borders of white day lilies funkia subcordata 

 edged a brick-paved walk with shining rosettes of 

 green, above which swung the fragrant trumpets in their 

 season. Behind the iron fretwork fence was a hedge of 

 the white queens of the meadow from July until frost, 

 crowned with snowy pyramids of bloom; and along the 

 walls in spring the columbine waved trumpets before the 

 budding leaves of hardy late chrysanthemums. 



The neighbors always stopped to look over the white 

 phlox into the wilderness at the clumps of gillyflowers 

 and pinks getting along in harmony where hollyhocks blos- 

 somed in increasing numbers every year, and the Johnny- 

 jump-ups traveled in endless procession in and out among 

 them all. 



Every one "knew the story of the broken-hearted recluse 

 who lived behind the closed shutters, and every one 

 lamented that for ten years no man, not even the useful 

 village si ave-of -all-work, had ever passed the padlocked 



