40 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
its post each year, though it does not bloom—it is said to take 
seven years’ residence in one spot for the wistaria to feel at 
home,—a grape-vine and Japanese wistaria are on the third 
side. It is a perfect bower of green and proved a curious 
stumbling-block to a strange urbanite, who found herself on 
our hill one morning. She wanted to get away, and I was 
anxious she should, as she came at a critical moment in my 
affairs, when, if she had been an intimate friend, I should have 
given her a good book, bidding her go sit under a green tree 
and be happy until I was free. Being a stranger, she was 
treated with more ceremony and less tolerance. 
“Tsn’t there a path down to the high road?” she inquired. 
“There is,’ said I with ill-concealed satisfaction. “You go 
down through the garden, and on through the orchard be- 
yond, and you will find a turnstile in the wall just as you reach 
the wood path.” 
She seemed a bit confused—perhaps she had once been lost 
in a wood and felt a natural caution. She wanted me to re- 
peat the directions; I did so, but she still stood uncertain. “I 
am to go down through that path and under that’’—she 
paused, extending a much bejewelled forefinger, her vocabu- 
lary, gathered on the city pave, had no equivalent for a luscious 
green arbor—“ That, ah—that awning?” she interrogated. 
“Yes, go under the awning,” I repeated, “and out through 
the orchard—you can’t miss the turnstile.” What this last 
rural term meant to her mind I never learned. As no one was 
reported missing in the woods, I presume she must have found 
her way. 
My walks are covered with sand, for it does not track into 
the house as the native soil would. Sand has another ad- 
vantage; it serves as a seed bed for a multitude of self-sowing 
plants. When I want a forcible hollyhock, lupine, canterbury 
bell or columbine, or desire particularly strong annuals such 
