132 GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 



leaves are not used for food, the treatment is simple enough, 

 but great caution must be used to prevent scattering poison 

 on the leaves of plants that are to be eaten as greens or 

 salad, lest sad results follow. 



The treatment for sucking insects — the bugs — is, how- 

 ever, different. These escape death by poison because they 

 drink deep, and so some way must be found to choke or to 

 smother them. This is accomplished by spraying with an 

 emulsion of kerosene, combined sometimes with whale-oil 

 soap. Hand spraying with a quart-size atomizer is not hard. 

 Yet, after all, in a small garden nothing is so effective as 

 doing the work by hand ; this means picking off the pests 

 or shaking them into a jar of kerosene, being careful not 

 to let one escape. 



It helps wonderfully to be able to recognize at a glance the 

 common insects in each of their various stages, to watch for 

 them both above and below ground, and if possible to outwit 

 their strategy. This again is in line with the work of the 

 experiment stations. A pair of butterflies, for instance, whirl 

 about on a sunshiny morning, dancing like fairies with their 

 pale, spotted wings. Where did they come from ? Less than 

 a month before, each dainty creature was an egg, belonging, 

 in fact, to a cluster of hundreds of tiny eggs that had been 

 skillfully gummed upon the under side of a juicy cabbage 

 leaf. Not many days elapsed before a transformation took 

 place and the eggs hatched into caterpillars, soft and green. 

 Coming into a rich inheritance of new cabbage, each little 

 caterpillar promptly began chewing its way into the crisp 

 inner leaves. Its span of life is, in fact, largely passed in this 

 land of plenty, first in the caterpillar and then in the chrysalis 

 stage, where it rests awhile before coming out a butterfly. 

 Twice a year, at least, new broods of cabbage caterpillars are 

 hatched from eggs. The canny farmer will of course not 



