Departments 
The Garden Miscellany 
What a spring this is! Who ever heard of MagnoUa, Forsythia, 
and Spice-bush fully out in March! The parks around Philadelphia 
were as far advanced on the 26th of March as they usually are on 
the loth of April. Even the Creeping Phlox and Aubretia were out 
in Philadelphia in the Rock Gardens, while around New York the 
Scilla and Adonis vernalis were in full swing and the Snowdrops 
and Pussy-willows all gone. In the woods the Hepatica, Anemone, 
Saxifrage and Skunk-cabbages which are due in the middle of April 
were here in March! The flowering Cherries which were sent from 
the Japanese Government as a gift to New York City about ten 
years ago, have been magnificent in Central Park during the first 
week in April. What we are vitally interested in is the effect on our 
gardens of this abnormal start. Reports from warm, sheltered 
gardens are distressing; tops of Candidum Lihes frozen, and tender 
shoots of all kinds blackened by this last sharp frost; but in more 
exposed situations and on cool or shady borders things were not 
far enough advanced to do any harm. But what an awful sight is a 
frost-bitten Magnoha tree! Such a revolting mass of brown dead 
blossoms. 
So many of our members hve far away from their precious gardens 
during the winter and can only sHp off for a day or two to see that 
bone-meal is dug around their shrubs at the earhest moment, that 
the leaves are taken off and that the perennials are dug around and 
fertiHzed. Lucky are you, my sisters, who hve in an "all the year 
round" place. You can watch the gradual coming of spring from 
your bedroom windows and leisurely do a little in the garden each 
sunny day — pruning, planning, poking about among the leaves — 
while we are nervously urging our husbands to go on business or golf 
trips so that we may snatch the coveted few days away from our 
city duties. For us the coming of the spring is observed from our 
car windows or in the city parks; it is a real heartache and longing 
to be in our gardens and watch quietly, as Thoreau did at Walden, 
the minute daily change in the tree-tops, the faint coming green of 
the meadows and our precious plants breaking ground. Do you 
remember those fines from "The Poet in the City," 
I have missed a Spring I can never see 
And the coining of birds is gone, — 
And oh, the peepers, — it isn't spring if you have not heard those 
first shrill little voices in the swamps. They must have been amazed 
to have to awake so early this year. 
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