A PILGRIMAGE 



N my usual semi-annual pilgrimage to various gardens to 

 see with my own eyes what flowers were abloom. I 

 wished especially to see the roses, and I hoped to find 

 many late-blooming worth-while roses and, I did. 

 Wherever I went, in every garden I visited, reconstruc- 

 tion work was in progress, and it became the expected 

 plaint, "Oh, how I wish you could have seen my garden 

 before we began changing things about!" I am sure I 

 would have missed not hearing it if some dear little gar- 

 dener had shown me a garden where the trowel and spade 

 and shovel were not clinking their song of change and 

 improvement, and the many mounds of dirt as mute 

 evidence of it, of our love for our gardens. I realized that patience 

 and perseverance are truly of the real gardener's supreme virtues. 



One met heaping wheel-barrows bringing rich loam to ex- 

 hausted beds, pails of air-slacked lime ornamenting the sides of the 

 garden paths, wooden half-pecks keeping them company, filled with 

 bone-meal and other good things the garden needs and finds 

 palatable and nourishing. 



Oh, it was all so interesting, so delightful, so happy, so joyful, 

 this coaxing the very most out of a garden without asking too 

 much of it! I saw certain plants too luxuriant, too prosperous. 



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