THE HANDLING OF THE LAND 103 
Fig. 95. These interesting shapes represent the suggestions of 
gardeners who will not be bound by what the market affords, 
but who have blades cut and fitted for their own satisfaction. 
Persons who followed the entertaining writings of one who 
called himself Mr. A. B. Tarryer, in “American Garden,” a 
few years back, will recall the great variety of implements that 
he advised for the purpose of extirpating his hereditary foes, 
the weeds. A variety of these blades and tools is shown in 
Figs. 96 and 97. I shall let 
Mr. Tarryer tell his story at 
some length in order to lead 
my reader painlessly into a new 
field of gardening pleasures. 
Mr.Tarryer contends that the 
wheel-hoe is much too clumsy 
an affair to allow of the pursuit 
of an individual weed. While 
the operator is busy adjusting 
his machine and manipulating 
it about the corners of the | 
garden, the quack-grass has 9/7. Some of the details of the Tarryer 
escaped over the fence or has fags: 
gone to seed at the other end of the plantation. He devised 
an expeditious tool for each little work to be performed 
on the garden, — for hard ground and soft, for old weeds and 
young (one of his implements was denominated “infant- 
damnation ”’). 
“Scores of times during the season,” Mr. Tarryer writes, 
“the ten or fifteen minutes one has to enjoy in the flower, 
fruit, and vegetable garden — and that would suffice for the 
needful weeding with the hoes we are celebrating — would be 
lost in harnessing horses or adjusting and oiling squeaky 
wheel-hoes, even if everybody had them. The ‘American 
Garden’ is not big enough, nor my patience long enough, to 
