Sheltered corner where bulbs bloom earliest. The shelter makes life possible for many plants which otherwise could not endure northern New York winters 



Planting Your Own Vine and Fig Tree — By Frances Duncan, 



New 

 Hampshire 



THE JOY THAT COMES TO ALL OF US WHO MAKE A GARDEN TO SUIT OUR OWN WHIMS, WITHOUT UNDUE REGARD 

 TO THE LAWS OF DESIGN AND HIGH ART — GARDENING IN THE BACK YARD FOR THE PURE LOVE OF IT 



WHOEVER would thoroughly enjoy 

 sitting under his vine and under his 

 fig tree should plant them himself. To buy 

 a place with these already set out is not 

 the same. To hire a man to plant them 

 destroys the peculiar charm. When one 

 has settled the fine earth about the roots 

 with his own fingers, pressed down the 

 soil and then raked smooth to obliterate 

 the footprints and make the bed look as 

 if the newcomer had always been there, 

 one is on terms of intimacy with a plant 

 that nothing afterward can shake. 



It is intimacy and fellowship that one 

 craves with a beloved object, not that there 

 should be acres of it. 



To know just where to look in the dead 

 brown grass for the sharp little points of 

 crocuses; to spend blissful afternoons in 

 late February pruning your roses, taking 

 all the time you like to decide which branch 

 should come off and which should stay, 

 instead of turning the poor thing over to 

 a hireling who may not know a sucker 

 from a graft and cares only to get through 

 the job as soon as he can; to know that 

 in the little brown stumps of stems you 

 leave (which your unlearned friend would 

 hardly stoop to glance at), lies sleeping a 

 wealth of beauty and June loveliness just 



ready to awake — it's the firm conviction 

 that the mother has of her child's excel- 

 lence though to all else the infant is an 

 uninteresting looking specimen. All this 

 is a pure happiness with which the size 

 of the garden has nothing to do. Your 

 empire may be a six-foot long bed or 

 sixty acres — the joy is the same. 



Who, but the one who has planted and 

 watched them, knows the sheltered places 

 where the snowdrops come up first, where 

 crocuses bloom the earliest and the first 

 faint blossoms of the Jasmine mil show 

 themselves even in late February. A 

 garden of annuals is but a makeshift, be- 

 cause precisely at the time when one most 

 craves a garden, it isn't there. Annuals par- 

 take of the nature of the summer boarder — ■ 

 there is by no means the permanent sat- 

 isfaction to be had in them that is in the 

 bulbs and shrubs and perennials to whom 

 the flower-bed is a settled home. 



The most exquisite happiness to be had 

 in this out-of-door world is in the wonder 

 and the hush of awakening life. When, 

 on a warm March morning, you lift the 

 covering from hollyhocks and larkspurs 

 and columbines as carefully as if you were 

 lifting a blanket from a sleeping baby; 

 when the sharp points of daffodil and 



158 



hyacinth poke their way through the soil; 

 when the life is all in the ground, and the 

 color all overhead — in the faint pale gold 

 of the cornel-tree, in the airy red of the 

 scarlet maple, in the dazzling whiteness of 

 magnolia blossoms — while the crocuses 

 and snowdrops under foot seem not so 

 much a part of the summer herbage as 

 sprites and fairies sent up from the under- 

 world to see how things are. For the 

 gardener, it is the most wonderful moment 

 of all the year — this, when the earth is 

 again Eden, before the lurking Serpent in 

 the guise of cutworm or other worker of 

 iniquity has entered into his Paradise. 

 And in this wonder and happiness has not 

 the gardener part and lot? Has he not 

 helped his garden to "come alive?" 



Probably if we had had the ordering 

 of the matter, we should have ushered in 

 spring with a blare of trumpets — with 

 flaming azaleas, Avith tulips in crimson and 

 gold and great horse-chestnut flowers over- 

 head quite bravura in manner. But Mother 

 Nature goes about it diferently. Swift 

 the movement is, opening of exquisite light- 

 ness and delicacy, but fast and faster — one 

 loveliness breaking in upon another like 

 the chorus of birds on an April morning. 

 Not allegretto is the time, but scherzo. 





