150 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
fashioned favorites, the almost forgotten things with aro- 
matic odors. She it is who has giant bushes of cabbage-roses, 
blush-roses, moss-roses, the deliciously scented white-rose. 
In her garden flourishes the heliotrope, carefully removed to a 
south window through the winter. Wallflowers are there, 
and fragrant evening stock, clove-pinks, and lavender, boy 
love and sweet-fern. Her little bed of annuals represents 
touch-me-nots and snapdragons, and zinnias and gillyflow- 
ers, and she raises a puzzled eyebrow when you call them 
Impatiens balsamina, Antirrhinum majus and Maithiola 
annua. 
While these are worthy exponents of the noble art of gar- 
dening—and may their tribe increase, for we can never have 
enough flowers in this sordid world—I find myself at variance 
with their principles. I am but a beggarly creature to the 
lordly owners of ten thousand flowers of any single variety; I 
am wholly lacking in esthetic appreciation of cut flowers to 
her who crams every fireplace, table and mantle shelf with 
her posies; I am a stingy miser to the openhanded, and an 
indiscriminate vagabond in the floral world to the con- 
servative grower of a few favorites. I scarcely know how 
to defend my position against so many opponents, and I 
dare not hope to make good my cause; yet this is where 
I stand. 
Once fairly launched on the catalogues, I had a consuming 
desire to make the personal acquaintance of every kind of 
hardy annual and perennial that I could obtain. Not that I 
wanted to continue raising them all, but I could not know 
them unless I grew them. Nor could I hope to accomplish 
my task in a single summer; I had the remainder of my life 
to pursue this fascinating question. Though I have bought 
from fifty to a hundred new varieties each year, I have the 
prospect of going on indefinitely. In short, my chief purpose 
