THE VEGETABLE GARDEN 116 



There was a time, indeed, when the tomato 

 was held to be a choice and highly decorative 

 feature in the flower garden. That, of course, 

 was before our time, even before our grand- 

 fathers' and our grandmothers' time, a time 

 before people could be persuaded that the 

 "Love Apple" of old-fashioned gardens (for so 

 the tomato was called) was fit for food and 

 was no longer considered a poisonous fruit, 

 highly dangerous to those who attempted to 

 eat it ! But that, too, was a time when flower- 

 beds were bordered with lettuce plants, for the 

 sake of decorative beauty of their green and 

 russet leaves, fit fohage for Flora's realm, but 

 like the tomato, now found only in vegetable 

 gardens. All this is not to suggest that the 

 finer fiber of those plants which find their le- 

 gitimate place in the garden of flowers does 

 not bring more votaries to such a shrine than 

 to that of those representatives of plant-life 

 on which we depend for so much of our daily 

 food. 



Neither vegetable garden nor flower gar- 

 den should be considered as rivals either one 

 to the other; instead, each has its own func- 

 tion in the workings of gardening. Neverthe- 



