GARDENING FOR LITTLE GIRLS 
broken twigs or branches, to hold the stems and 
keep the flowers in position without crowding. 
Breaking up a few ferns to illustrate, he dropped 
them in a cut glass dish, and then stuck in a dozen 
stalks of pale pink primroses. The result was an 
inexpensive table decoration as beautiful as any 
costly display of roses. Personally, I did not ap- 
prove of his ferns, as they would very quickly de- 
cay in the water: but as a child I had learned from 
my grandmother his better idea of half-filling the 
dish with clean sand. It holds the stems exactly 
as placed, and can be entirely hidden by the foliage. 
Roses, the gentleman also told us, draw up water 
above the surface only one-half the length of the 
stem in the water, and consequently should not ex- 
tend more than that height above the water,—else 
the ‘‘forcing power”’ (as it is called) will not carry 
it far enough to sustain the flowers at the end of 
the stems. (This may account for my own success 
in keeping roses often for a week, for I usually take 
them out of the water, lay them in a wet box or 
paper, and place them flat in the ice-box over night 
so the water in the stems can flow to the extreme 
end.) He also said they should never be crowded 
together, but rather be separated as the primroses 
were. Both the leaves and the thorns under water 
should be removed, as the leaves quickly foul the 
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