100 ~©=>rdsHardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
for covering the strawberry beds. One winter I used them 
in great quantities, covering every bed deep with them, 
after a heavy snow fall, and it proved the most disastrous 
winter in my experience. The field mice got in, made nests 
of the needles, subsisted on a mixed diet of resin from the 
pine, larkspur crowns, iris leaves, the bark of shrubs. The 
pine needles were gnawed off and strewn thick over the entire 
garden. I may be reasoning from a false premise, but I 
have laid my heavy losses that winter to the score of pine 
boughs, as it was the only winter I ever was troubled with 
mice, and the only time I ever used pine boughs to any extent. 
Some plants are said to be benefited by a heavy mulch of 
coal ashes, such as hollyhocks, larkspurs; but I notice this 
advice proceeds from the vicinity of New York and New 
Jersey where the winters are more open and trying to plant 
life than they are in my region. In reviewing my various 
experiments, I find the best results came from allowing a 
thin layer of leaves to settle over the beds, as they were blown 
about in the autumn, adding them where too thinly spread, 
holding them in place by slender sticks or the stalks of tall 
perennials, and after the first snow fall, which serves as a 
blanket, I spread a very thin coating of strawy manure over 
the snow. This gives a three-ply covering, each very slight, 
but the protection is perfect as the snow does not melt under 
the manure until early April, unless it rains. In the winter 
of 1906-’07, the most severe on record, I did not lose a 
single plant under this treatment. It cannot be depended 
on save in regions where the snow lies deep all winter. How- 
ever, it is not the actual cold that kills hardy things: it is the 
unseasonable warm day that prematurely starts growth; and 
anything that can prevent this, gives protection. In warmer 
latitudes than mine people have great trouble in raising 
young hollyhocks, perennial poppies and white larkspurs, 
