24 MY GROWING GARDEN 



of the foreign sort, but he beKeves that rigid and 

 thoughtful selection toward a high ideal is sure to 

 bring about improvements that are worth while 

 in standard sorts of vegetables. So aU summer 

 he travels to where his seed-crops are growing — 

 and they are planted where they grow best to 

 uniform excellence — in order that he may cull and 

 cut out, or "rogue" in the trade phrase, every 

 plant not up to his exacting standard. If he is 

 wrong, so was Darwin; but I beheve in both. 



When I first began to photograph things that 

 grow in the groimd, I took what was really a 

 beautiful picture of a certain radish to a veteran 

 seedsman — a great old man whose years had been 

 spent in searching always for the best. He saw 

 no beauty in the photograph, because, as he ex- 

 plained to me, the tails of the radishes were entirely 

 too "coarse." Think of refined radish tails, Mr. 

 Doubter-of-Seedsmen, and reaUze just how, by 

 a lifetime's interest in selecting so that the flesh 

 would get into the radish and out of the tails, it 

 has come about that you are served at breakfast 

 with delicious little globes, or ovals, or thick 

 pencils, of fresh pungency. 



Grass is just grass, of course, to most of us; yet 

 another of these discriminating seedsmen has been 

 considering otherwise for a generation. He knows 



