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EVERY WOMAN HER OWN FLOWER GARDENER. 



pear trees, beside the garden beds, where grew Sweet Rocket, Violets, 

 Columbines, Spiderwort, Fleur de Luce, Daffodils, Sweet Williams, 

 Gilliflowers, Larkspurs, Lychnis, and Nasturtiums, bright as butter- 

 flies ? To be sure you do, and never will forget them while memory 

 serves to furnish pictures for the mind's eye to view. Perhaps you 

 gathered them to adorn a fair sister, when she gave her hand to the lover 

 whom all considered tried and true ; or, with fast dropping, blinding 

 tears, they were plucked to wither in the chilling embrace of the reaper, 

 Death, who had gathered the fairest flower of the hearthstone — the 

 dearly loved baby — the youngest of the home circle ! All these associ- 

 ations, and hundreds of others, are linked to the " old-fashioned flowers " 

 of the past; so let us make room for them in the garden, and cherish 

 them fondly for the sake of those who once loved them so well. 



I have a great fondness for the older annuals and hardy perennials, 

 which are now too often despised and neglected ; many of them are cer- 

 tainly more beautiful than those which are so much praised. 



A well-pruned "Snowball," in full bloom, is surely a thing of beauty! 

 And I am certain that there are many discarded flowers which would 

 amply repay cultivation. 



The tendency of the age is to run after all that is rare and new, and 

 to neglect that which every one possesses, forgetting the divine command 

 to the chief of apostles, not to despise anything that God had made, nor 

 to esteem it common. The first Dandelion possesses a great charm to 

 me, is always gathered, and kept in water as long as a trace of its beauty 

 remains. If it were a rare Japanese or Chinese novelty, how we should 

 cherish it ! but, no, it grows commonly by the road side, and in every 

 pasture, so we pass it by. / 



There is no sweeter flower than the old, neglected Wall-flower, yet 

 who cultivates it now ? A recent writer says : " These old-fashioned 

 flowers have a sweet fragrance which does not belong to modern favor- 

 ites ; and however much the last may delight us, they do not make us 

 call to mind those delightful passages of our older poets that made our 

 imaginations paint scenes of simple rural, floral beauty and loveliness 

 that no artistic pencil can realize; but these ^old ladies' flowers,' or 

 * flowers of the poets,' often unveil to us some lovely picture or scene 

 that long since, in our earlier readings, we had painted in the chambers 

 of our heart, and from which memory, thus assisted, removes a pile of 

 rubbish that had well nigh buried it in oblivion." 



