TARRYTOWN LETTERS— V. 



BY A. B TARRYEK. 



OH, THESE WOMEN ! "HORTICULTURE IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS" TIN-CAN FLOWER POTS BOTANIC VS. 



COMMON NAMES OF PLANTS MRS. TARRYER CALLS ON THE WISDOM OF THE 



GRANGES WASHINGTON LEGISLATORS BROUGHT TO GRASS. 



ELIGHTFUL it is to find our 

 old friend Thomas Meehan 

 dropping suggestive para- 

 graphs into The American 

 Garden, and curious to ob- 

 serve that in both instances, 

 in the January number, he 

 has run across Mrs. Tarry- 

 er's hawser, or, rather, 

 that good lady's street-yarn. 



Oh, these women ! It is no wonder Rev. Joel 

 Howe's biographer lets him stamp his cane down 

 hard, and say : " I wish there luasift a woman in the 

 world !" No sooner than we get our little systems 

 fixed to our minds, than some woman will whisk her 

 skirts around and knock them over — or else she 

 will bring up a boy to do it. 



For my part I was believing what Mr. Meehan 

 said under " Horticulture in the Public Schools," 

 about the impossibility of growing geraniums in a 

 tight heir-loom of a wooden flower-pot, with a sav- 

 ings-bank of paper money in the secret bottom. 

 But no sooner had I read the piece to Mrs. Tarryer 

 than she stepped into the other room, returning 

 with her arms full of the most beautiful young 

 geraniums in bloom, all from slips, and every one 

 of them was growing luxuriantly in tin cans, tight 

 as a bottle, and covered nicely with maroon colored 

 paper ! 



"There are lots of coal-clinkers for drainage in 

 the bottoms," she said. " It is a good way to raise 

 plants from slips. The earth below and at the 

 sides never gets dry. But we must be careful and 

 not water too much. The principle involved is not 

 greatly different in effect from that of the hard-pan 

 in some parts of our garden, is it ? A false bottom 

 to these cans could be stuffed with bank bills and 

 take no harm, you see." 



Mr. Meehan will pull himself together, no doubt, 

 as I did, for this view only shows, as he said, that 

 plant life should be a study of the first importance 

 in all schools, and indicates an abundant source of 

 outfitting material of all sizes for potting. Nothing 

 can be handier than those papered tin cans. The 



vigor of foliage and wealth of blossoms soon covers 

 the handsome pots out of sight. They stand on 

 shelves, tables and windows much closer than flar- 

 ing vessels, and are cleaner to handle. 



The other point — referring to what Mr. Meehan 

 says on page 56 about common and botanic names 

 — he half yields to Mrs. Tarryer already, because 

 it is right in line with his life-long thinking and 

 writing, and because she is a pronoun of multitude, 

 covering an immense number of women, who will 

 have an advance in popular education. 



There must be something like uniformity in the 

 common speech of the people regarding the plants 

 that are of use to them, or else civilization comes 

 to a stand. This is the more needful since rail- 

 ways are fetching everybody together and making 

 all sorts of grotesque provincialisms seem more ab- 

 surd by scattering them. Mrs. " Pomona" Tarryer 

 had the "parrot's own " time among the granges 

 while she was proving that farmers know a great 

 deal about grasses if they only had the genuine 

 names to convey the knowledge. 



One time in a grange she arranged with her sister 

 Graces (Ceres and Flora), to see how much the 

 men-folks really did know about their own business. 

 There was company present ; one or two retired 

 clergymen, first-rate gardeners ; quite a gathering 

 of deacons, elders and select men from out of 

 town, besides a strong local muster of our most 

 careful and influential farmers — old diggers, all, 

 and men of bank accounts — the fathers of rural 

 and urban society, with their wives and daughters. 



Mrs. Tarryer took these stalwart husbandmen 

 on a question of the number of grasses each had 

 seen and could describe — from memory, mind you 

 — in his meadows, pastures, gardens, fields, swamps 

 and road-sides. She begged them jiot to mention 

 names at all, but to confine themselves to telling 

 how each grass looked — how and where it grew, and 

 so forth. 



This put all hands on their intellectual muscle, so 

 to speak. The characteristics of some twenty or 

 twenty-five grasses were spread before us with such 

 photographic particularity that every old weeder and 



