Vices of Plants 109 
and but scanty rations are accorded either to old residents or 
the new-comer. I try to play a Guardian of the Poor to these 
too-numerous waifs, and I know the difficulty of finding 
good Christian homes for the progeny of Lychnis dioica rosea, 
Veronica spicata, Digitalis purpurea, Aquilegia vulgaris, Rud- 
beckia, Chrysanthemum parthenium, Chrysanthemum maxi- 
mum, all illustrious families found in every Florist’s Blue 
Book. I try to build model tenements to accommodate the 
most promising of them in the annual construction of new 
beds, but I cannot keep pace with the teeming population, 
and for want of sufficient ground space, may have to devise 
hanging gardens eighteen stories high—garden-scrapers shall 
I call them? I should like to communicate with any one in 
possession of the original working plans of the hanging gar- 
dens of Babylon, for though they may be somewhat old-fash- 
ioned, yet they may furnish good ideas. I always prick up ears 
when Asa Gray mentions any plant as “cultivated in choice 
gardens,” certainly a patent of floral nobility. I now believea 
choice garden represents the aristocratic inner circle, the élite, 
a condition where the undesirable proletariat, the free seeders, 
are strictly excluded. Surely that is high society that has 
no poor relations, no unsought younger sons, no Botany Bay. 
Some plants are valetudinarians, tender of constitution, 
with crochety appetities; and if the table prepared for them 
is not to their liking, they die of disapproval. Lilies are ex- 
amples of this caprice. They like rich food, the richer the 
better, but it must be predigested, as it were. They require a 
heavily manured soil, further enriched with leaf mold; but 
it must be prepared a year or two in advance, and then they 
must be carefully insulated from it by a generous environment 
of sand. Their conduct reminds me of delicate ladies who 
pretend to nibble at the table, and gorge unseen from the 
pantry shelf. Would it be surprising, after eons of such cod- 
