THE PURPLE BEECH. 



6oi 



bonnet from the mountains to her home, a distance of 

 over five hundred miles, slowly traversed ; and at an- 

 other time a clump of them flourished after six weeks of 

 almost constant knocking about, packed between two 

 old overshoes in the bottom of a Saratoga trunk. 



Whichever ferns grow well about your neighbor- 

 hood may be relied upon to thrive in your garden in a 

 loose, light soil enriched with leaf mould, peeped at by 

 the sun for a few moments daily and watered occasion- 

 ally with a fine spray, if the weather be very dry. A 

 shady and sheltered position is best chosen for the 

 hardy fernery. The wind that snaps the fronds and 

 parches the ground must be avoided as well as the 

 noon-day sun. Under favorable conditions the ostrich, 

 the sensitive and the cinnamon ferns, the common 

 brake in several varieties, many aspidiums or shield 

 ferns with their finally serrated plumes, the maiden-hair 

 and the diminutive polypody may be made to thrive as 

 vigorously in the shadow of your house as they did in 

 their native glens. In no other part of the garden may 

 so many souvenirs of pleasant travels be treasured up 

 as in the fernery — not least among the reasons for its 

 existence. The thriving fern-bed suggests the possi- 

 bility of a nook in the garden where wild flowers will 

 tangle with the delightful unconscious grace they wear 

 in fields, woods and road-sides. How enchanting a 

 reality, but how hopeless, you say, to think of trans- 

 planting a bit of forest to one's own door-yard ! An 

 anemone would surely never survive its first glimpse of 

 a mowing machine, and who could reasonably expect to 

 find arbutus trailing its sweet self over ground sold at 

 so much a front foot ! 



But let the skeptical novice take up "Mary's 

 Meadow," or " Letters from a Little Garden," remem- 

 bering that Mrs. Ewing's knowledge wherefrom she 

 wrote was, for the most part, gleaned in transforming 

 the barren, neglected grounds about a soldier's barrack 

 into a "Parkinson's Paradise." Let her make an ex- 

 cursion to the nearest woods while the first flush of 

 enthusiasm lasts and dig up generous clumps of violets — 

 purple, yellow and white ; anemones, hepaticas, blood- 

 root, wake-robins, wild azaleas, jacks-in-the-pulpit, arbu- 

 tus, partridge-berry and wintergreen vines, golden rod, 

 mountain laurel and rhododendron, the feathery cle- 

 matis, columbines, sweet-briar, azaleas, wild honey- 

 suckles, blue flag and whatever else tempts her, reject- 

 ing nothing because it looks wild and frail. So far 

 from any of these plants just mentioned not doing as 

 well in a garden as in their natural homes, they are in- 

 dividually known to improve under ordinary cultivation. 



Even arbutus increases and blossoms abundantly year 

 after year about the roots of a certain bed of rhododen- 

 drons, which supply it, apparently, with every needful 

 condition. 



Nearly all wild flowers require a light soil, plenti- 

 fully enriched with leaf-mould, and demand, especially, 

 that their roots be kept cool. In the dense shade of the 

 woods, plants rarely suffer from droughts, but in gar- 

 dens the rapid evaporation of dew and rain is to be 

 guarded against by laying small flat rocks among the 

 roots of the flowers. Given light, air and sunshine for 

 the leaves, and rich, cool soil for the roots to spread 

 themselves in, and few wild plants, unless especially 

 exacting, will miss their native nooks. Florists say 

 many house-plants die, not because the leaves and stalks 

 are unable to endure the hot and dry air of our living 

 rooms, but because the pots in which they are confined, 

 taking on the temperature about them, slowly bake the 

 rootlets clinging to their sides. If the pots were 

 plunged in larger pots or boxes of moist saw-dust or 

 sand, our rubber plants and palms might imagine them- 

 selves in a tropical forest and grow accordingly. 



There are, of course, many beautiful flowers which 

 die annually that every one wants in her garden ; sweet 

 peas, mignonette, pansies, heliotrope and nasturtiums, 

 for example, and it is well to plan spaces for them now, 

 though their blossoms seem so far off, because with the 

 woods to draw from, there is danger of their being 

 crowded out. liut the nearer one comes to having a 

 hardy garden entire, the nearer perfection it will be 

 from the practical, artistic and poetical stand points, 

 but not from your gardener's point of view — you must 

 be prepared for withering blasts of scorn from that 

 quarter. Can any one imagine a lovely painting with 

 a geometrical flower-bed in the foreground, or think 

 of a poet rhapsodising in a sonnet "To A Well- 

 Sheared Coleus Star ?" The hardy garden has other 

 advantages, however, besides its permanence, its 

 faculty of taking care of itself, its greater artistic 

 beauty, or its wealth of mementoes of travel and friend- 

 ships. "A garden of hardy flowers," writos Mrs. 

 E wing to her ' 'little friend, "is " pre-eminently a garden 

 for cut-flowers. You must carefully count this among 

 its merits, because if a constant and undimmed blaze 

 outside were the one virtue of a flower-garden, uphold- 

 ers of the bedding-out system would now and then have 

 the advantage of us. For my own part, I am prepared 

 to say that I want my flowers quite as much for the 

 house as the garden, and so, I suspect, do most women." 



Mrs. R. H. Gray. 



THE PURPLE BEECH. 



0UR illustration, page 591, shows a good speci- 

 men of the purple or copper beech growing 

 upon the grounds of F. W. Bruggerhof (of 

 the firm of J. M. Tfiorburn & Co.), at Stamford, Ct. 

 The purple beech is one of the most satisfactory of 



all purple-leaved trees because of the permanence of 

 its character, and the fact that the tree possesses 

 other merits than mere color. All the purple- 

 leaved trees change color more or less during the 

 season, and the copper beech is no exception to the 



