December, 1914 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



155 



"Dear me! I must speak to Pere- 

 grine; he is invariably late." 



But by that time Peregrine had driven 

 off, breathing a bit hard from the late 

 excitement. 



Peregrine's instructions were that he 

 should be at the Worthington residence 

 at a quarter of nine. But whether the 

 old darkey were dilatory or whether he 

 held a firm opinion that nine o'clock was 



"Just at the open- 

 ing . . . stood 

 a tall young fel- 

 low, sketch book 

 in hand" 



4& r - 



■r~ 



too early for Mr. Horace Worthington 

 to be at his office, it would be hard to 

 say; but never, during the past five 

 years, did he appear at the Worthington 

 house before exactly nine. And alwavs 

 Mr. Worthington intended to "repri- 

 mand Peregrine." 



Mr. Worthington was not at all suc- 

 cessful at reprimands; either he post- 

 poned giving them or they missed the 

 mark and went harmlessly over the head 

 of the offender. 



"Patrick," Roberta heard him say to 

 an aged workman who had done exactly 

 the opposite of the instruction given, 

 "it seems to me that if there is an 

 erroneous method of work, you invar- 

 iably choose it!" 



"Yis, sorr," responded Patrick with 

 contented pride, "oi do that!" 



Mr. Worthington was a bachelor of 

 seventy, with the serenity and benignity 

 that seems to come to many men who 

 have lived their fives among plants: for 

 gardens have a way of blessing those 

 who really love them. 



He was a scholarly old gentleman. 

 He liked to quote Horace and Ovid, and 

 would repeat line after line of Homer be- 

 cause he liked the music and sonorous- 

 ness of the old poet. He read Sir Thomas 

 Browne. He never could plan an or- 

 chard without associating it, in his mind, 

 with Sir Thomas Browne's adored 

 quincunx — the quincunx which, for the 

 exquisite old prose-poet, seemed the 

 quintessence of garden symbolism. As a 

 young man he had travelled extensively, 



not only on the Continent, but in Russia, 

 and Japan, which then was an almost 

 unknown country. He knew the Kew 

 Gardens almost as well as he knew Rose- 

 berry Gardens. And in landscape gar- 

 dening he swore by Repton and by Le 

 Notre. 



Yet with all his love and feeling for 

 antiquity, for the beauty and charm of 

 the older gardens, in horticulture and 

 horticultural experiment, he was not so 

 much intensely modern as he was a 

 futurist. For to be modern is to be 

 mentally in the fashion, and merely to 

 echo the thought and feeling about one 

 — an easy and unimportant thing to do. 

 Horace Worthington was a futurist. 

 As early as in the '40's he was writing of 

 city playgrounds for children, of roof- 

 gardens where plants might really be 

 grown, of house-top conservatories, 

 things which to-day, some seventy years 

 later, are matters of "modern experi- 

 ment." 



He wished to see a winter garden in 

 the heart of the city — an entire block 

 devoted to it, the centre a great glassed 

 in space, with no extra heat but what 

 the sun through the glass afforded. The 

 outer edges of the square would be art- 

 shop, florist shop, curios and others at- 

 tracted by the charm of the situation. 

 Here would be, not hot-house plants, 

 but grown as in the open those not quite 

 able to stand a northern winter — cam- 

 ellias, Indian azaleas, tender rhodo- 

 dendrons, the Southern jessamine. Here 

 might the aged and convalescent sit 

 and sun themselves and watch the busy 

 life go by and drink in happiness. In 

 summer, the glass would be removed and 

 it would be a Public Garden. 



But when he wrote of those ideas to 

 the papers in rather flowery letters 

 signed "Agricola," he was accused of 

 getting his ideas from Nineveh and 

 Babylon, of being so steeped in his be- 

 loved ancients that he was "out of touch 

 with modern life." Worthington was 

 considered old-fashioned, a sentimental- 

 ist and a 

 dreamer 

 about gar- 

 dens. 



Because a i 



thing 

 never 

 done, 

 was 



had 

 been 



and 

 not 



Inside the house had changed as 

 litUe as the outside " 



horticul- 

 tural usage, 

 was no rea- 

 son why it 



shouldn't be done. Because a plant 

 "couldn't be grown in this country" was 

 no reason why it mightn't thrive at 

 Roseberry Gardens. 



And if, in his mind, the experiment 



of the Arabian gardeners centuries and 

 centuries ago with the traditional "blue 

 roses," the supposed origin of the yellow 

 roses linked themselves with the present 

 way of encouraging the blue tint in 

 Hortensis hydrangeas by iron filings in 

 the soil, he would consider the Arabian 

 gardener a fellow experimenter, ani- 

 mated all those years back with the same 

 passionate interest in a plant's possi- 

 bilities. He, too, had lived in the future. 



So where other horticulturists were 

 content to import new or unusual plants, 

 Horace Worthington was never content 

 until he could grow them and grow them 

 easily in the Roseberry Gardens with no 

 more than the customary amount of 

 care. Wherefore, instead of importing 

 plants, he imported Rudolph Trommel, 

 whose interest in experiment was as great 

 as his own. 



Horace Worthington had the theory 

 that, although it was possible to modify 

 the soil, it was not possible to modify 

 the climate, but that the plants them- 

 selves could learn to suit it. That if a 

 plant could, by coddling, be brought 

 through safely, the second or third gen- 

 eration might endure the climate without 

 coddling. 



Because he believed in the climatic 

 similarity, Japan and Japanese horti- 

 culture interested him greatly. He had 

 met Siebold, the German botanist; he 

 knew well Dr. Hall ; and it was to Rose- 

 berry Gardens that Dr. Hall brought 

 the exquisite Japanese flowering apple, 

 known first as Malus Halleana, now as 

 Pyrus Mains, var. Parkmanni. 



He and Rudolph Trommel would hold 

 in the private office long and animated 

 conversations, chiefly about rhododen- 

 drons, of which Roberta could not help 

 but hear fragments. 



" It is the climate that makes the differ- 

 ence," Mr. Worthington would say. 

 "It makes the difference in races and in 

 plants. Give Labrador the climate of 

 Equatorial Africa and you will have 

 tropical vegetation. It is our climate 

 that strains the English rhododendrons; 

 the peat soil or not has little to do with 

 it. The extremes and sudden changes 

 tax the root system, and that is why a 

 native rhododendron has twice the spread 

 of roots that an English one has. It 

 needs them." 



• "That may be so," assented Rudolph 

 Trommel. 



" If we can develop a good root system, 

 we have it! Peat does not encourage a 

 large root system and demands much 

 moisture; we must try it without peat, 

 and with no surface watering. If we 

 get the resistance of the Catawbiense, 

 with the fine color, it will be an achieve- 

 ment!" 



"It iss possible," said old Rudolph, 



