The Garden 

 that We Made 



soil and everything else is expressly prepared for them. 

 Here is indeed a proof that flowers thrive when their 

 owners love them. For my little girl is so fond of 

 roses that she admires every opening" bud. More than 

 that she has not done for them, I confess ; but for 

 some unexplainable reason her roses are always the 

 finest, and she is always coming to one or another 

 of us with very choice specimens of roses from her own 

 bushes. 



One year my little girl had got the idea that she wanted 

 everlasting flowers in her garden, so that she could take 

 something from her garden that she could keep through 

 the winter. A bunch of everlasting flowers in a vase in 

 her little room would remind her in Stockholm of her 

 garden down in the south of Sweden. 



The perennial yellow poppies were sown in the garden, 

 and these shed a quantity of seeds from which, in August, 

 fresh seedling plants come up round the parent plant. 

 This was precisely what my little girl had discovered when 

 she was quite a tiny tot. Without a word to anyone, she 

 carefully removed some of the young seedlings, and we 

 found them planted in quite a different part of the garden. 

 She had discovered how the transplanting should be done, 

 and was duly proud of her achievement. 



On the whole, I think girls have a greater liking for 

 gardening than boys. From their earliest years onwards, 

 boys prefer such manly occupations as bridge-building or 

 the construction of forts. 



Yet it would be unfair to assert that no boys like 

 gardening. I remember how a boy cousin and I roved far 

 into the woods and along meadows to look for flowers. He 

 was then about eight, and quite an adept in making 

 bouquets, and we used to compete as to who could make 

 up the prettiest one for the breakfast table of our grand- 

 mother — Queen Victoria. 



We were also competitors in learning the names of 

 flowers. That was how I got to love flowers even as a 

 child. The English names are often so much more 



64 



Digitized by IVIicrosoft® 



