174 MY GROWING GARDEN 



rapidly as possible substituted by grass or 

 hydrangea. Now my friend's not extended knowl- 

 edge of the vegetable kingdom would only have 

 amused me, had he not been for many years a 

 man of authority about a summer-home mountain- 

 top, that mountain-top being in the heart of a bit 

 of primeval forest, with its flower-set * 'floor" and 

 its native-shrub undergrowth. Acting on his 

 ideals, he had destroyed as weeds quantities of 

 the dainty pink moccasin-flower orchid, great 

 colonies of the sweet maianthemum, with New 

 England asters, clintonia, trilliums and the Hke, 

 as nature had planted them in more centuries of 

 time that he is years old; and he had "brushed 

 out" of the forest laurels and red-berried elders, 

 and superbly symmetrical old specimens of the 

 withe-rod viburnum, the high-bush huckleberry, 

 and other plant-citizens belonging in this favored 

 place. And then he sowed grass seed and planted 

 hydrangeas, so that this nave of God's forest 

 temple might look hke his Pennsylvania front 

 yard! The grass, finding little encouragement in 

 the mountain mold, was hard to establish, and 

 even yet the lovely partridge-berry and certain 

 of the buttercup family break through and put 

 the sickly grass-roots out of business. But the 

 hydrangea has grown vociferously, rampantly. 



