Vee 
Seeds 59 
of my shovel all kinds of desirable but unsolicited tenants 
have moved in and make themselves very much at home. As 
my heart is grateful for any garden good, when unsought Anne 
Hathaway poppies, that are given the freedom of the vegetable 
garden rods away, offer themselves as stancher friends than 
shy pentstemons or reluctant Lobelia syphilitica, the fault is 
not wholly mine if a lusty poppy bed flourishes over the heads 
of these recalcitrants. 
“Oh, but that is not gardening in the strict sense,”’ you will 
say, severely. 
“Of course not,” I reply, “but it is flowers, and plenty of 
them, and if not of one kind, then another, by all means. I 
like surprises—some people call them disappointments; all 
depends upon how you look at them.’ The earth must be 
clothed, and every seed-bed is a living testimony to Sir 
Thomas Browne’s commentary on that memorable third day 
of Creation: “Gardens were before gardeners, and but some 
hours after the earth.” Equal suffrage dates from the mo- 
ment, when, after the appearance of dry land, the earth busied 
itself bringing forth grass, herbs and trees, each yielding seed 
after its own kind. 
I continue to experiment with twenty-five to fifty new va- 
rieties every year, just to see what they are, though I retain 
but few of the annuals as permanent residents. If, after three 
years’ trial, I do not get results from a perennial seed, I buy a 
single plant of it, and propagate by division of the root, and 
also sow its first seed as soon as it matures, and again the next 
spring. I have tried to cover the peculiarities of seeds and 
their special requirements in the Appendix. Some are ex- 
tremely difficult to grow under ordinary conditions. I have 
utterly failed to germinate Dictamnus, Lobelia syphilitica, 
Athionema, Trollius, Romneya coultera, Adenophora and 
Ranunculus. These I have bought as plants. Some seeds 
