28 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
the same line, and taking out only a little earth at a time, suc- 
ceed in doing with her own hands all the digging that can be 
required in a small garden, the soil of which, if it has been in 
long cultivation, can never be very hard or very difficult to 
penetrate; and she will not only have the satisfaction of seeing 
the garden created, as it were, by the labor of her own hands, 
but she will find her health and spirits wonderfully improved 
by the exercise, and by the reviving smell of the fresh earth.” 
Was ever hard labor so delicately sugar-coated? with all my 
errors of judgment I never took a homeopathic view of the 
relation between earth and tools. 
I feel like a hoyden when I recall my energetic efforts, the 
farm shovel, the pickax, the thirty-five-pound crowbar. I 
have no extenuating “as it weres” in myrecord. It isa clear 
and undeniable charge upon my past that I did actually 
create my garden from a stone heap—not from “land under 
long cultivation.” I am a barbaric Amazon; but what can be 
expected of one with a probable Irish ancestor except a wild 
outbreak of rude strength in unguarded moments, when 
wrestling with virgin soil. 
Further: the lady’s proper weapon is a spade “smooth, 
sufficiently slender for a lady’s hand to grasp, of close elastic 
wood,” only “tolerably strong”—evidently no lady is ex- 
pected to expend her precious strength, provided she has any, 
on garden operations—“one that shall penetrate the ground 
with the least possible trouble.” Still further: “ A lady should 
have a pair of stiff leathern gloves or gauntlets to protect her 
hands not only from the handle of her spade, but from stones, 
weeds, e¢ cetera which she may turn over with the earth, and 
which ought to be picked out and thrown into a small light 
wheelbarrow which may be easily moved from place to place.” 
Surely this picture of sweetness and light quite shames me. 
This is the way true femininity conducts itself in the presence 
