yanking up handfuls of Brodieas to get the price of a movie ticket. 
To interest him in an individual flower garden of wild things would 
be another matter, and might gladden his eyes and pocketbook at the 
same time, for he could sell flowers and seeds as well. What better 
commercial venture for a child than to offer a traveller a few blossoms 
of Tidy-tips, layia platyglossa, with a packet of seeds to take home to 
plant? Of course this means saving the seed from the previous year's 
planting — it is easy to do. I experimented last Spring in collecting 
seeds; a ten-cent package of phacelia grandiflora filled a bed four feet 
square, leaving many extra plants to give away; over an ounce of seed 
was gathered without pajdng any attention to what the wind scat- 
tered; this Spring there are volunteers all over that part of the 
garden. A yard of table oilcloth made a damp-proof collector; the seeds 
dropped or were shaken onto it from time to time. 
The whole success of wild gardening rests with the varieties 
you plant. Wild flowers, like some people, do not take kindly to a 
new environment; indeed, many of the wild things look out of place 
and act it. I was once rash enough to transplant to an eastern city 
garden the pink and white Ladyslipper, cypripedium spectabile; it 
Kved, but I always felt like apologizing for its presence — it did not 
belong among urban plants. Yet the Hepatica and Mertensia bloomed 
in the Spring-corner of that garden and looked at home. There are 
wild flowers so accommodating that they will bloom anywhere. It 
is from this group that we plan to select seed for the children's gar- 
dens. Indeed, older gardeners would do well to keep to the sturdy 
varieties, as one can easily reproduce conditions for certain kinds of 
seeds and thus satisfy the desire to help perpetuate our native flora. 
Before coming to California to live I dreamed of a garden which 
should commemorate in trees, shrubs and plants the famous botanists 
who had discovered them. In this magical climate, where vegeta- 
tion sometimes outstrips the Beanstalk of our youth, most things 
seem possible: but a Redwood tree does not grow up over night, 
so my longing still has only "the substance of a dream." Perhaps 
some one else may plant it if I recount what beauties could be 
there. Against a background of Douglas Firs and Sugar Pines shall 
blossom Nuttal's Dogwood, more beautiful than our eastern variety, 
which it resembles, the cornus florida. Next to these starry branches 
shall grow the ceanothus thyrsiflorus and its hybrids, whose blossoms 
are like wisps of blue sky caught on green t^vigs. It is much too lovely 
a shrub to be miscalled a Lilac; it deserves a name aU its own, though 
it cannot but pale in glory before the memory of those incomparable 
Lilacs in Rochester's Highland Park, It is a first cousin of the ceano- 
thus Americanus, the New Jersey Tea, whose leaves our Revolutionary 
ancestors drank as a beverage. Ce-an-o-thus it is! Far easier to pro- 
nounce than its discoverer's name, which weighs down our orange 
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