44 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
The same thing happened with a blue lupine. It wouldn’t 
budge until I applied pickax and crowbar. I tried the same 
forcible argument on a blue Veronica spicata that was given 
temporary shelter in a pink bed until the pink tenants got 
better established. So far the Veronica has won every round; 
its position is impregnable and I am alternately divided be- 
tween my determination to use dynamite if necessary, or to 
capitulate with the Veronica and decide that a little bright 
blue is not criminal in a pink bed. As the season advances 
and the bloom is past, and it is incontinently shedding its un- 
reachable seéds in every direction, I think I shall resort to ex- 
plosives. Rocks are great institutions for permanent residents. 
My various operations have included many compromises. 
I came across one stone that took two straining men and a 
stout work horse to slide it down into a deep hole, where it was 
covered up to remain until Judgment Day. Then I found 
others that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t 
stir, and they still maintain their positions by sheer force of 
character. One of these I walked around so much, trying to 
decide what could be done with it, that I wore a little path. 
The big stone and the little path looked so very Japanese that 
I came to accept it on those terms, and by dint of rough stone 
steps leading up to the little path, a clematis trained up as an 
entrance gate to it, and a rustic vine-covered fence beyond, I 
have a queer anomalous corner filled with a succession of blue 
flowers that quite delights my heart, for I can see it through a 
window as I sit at my desk every day. To-day the blue flowers 
are mostly gone with only the Liatris and Michaelmas daisies 
still to come: but by accident a native white aster by the rustic 
fence has shot up several stalks seven feet high, with a crown 
of bloom several feet across, and framing it about as a halo, I 
see pale pink, deep rose pink and cardinal red hollyhocks 
which grow in beds beyond it. It is needless to say that this 
