Childhood in a Garden 
337 
The sixty-two folk names of the Foxglove give 
ample proof of its closeness to humanity ; it is a 
familiar flower, a home flower. Of these many 
names I never heard but two in New England, and 
those but once ; an old Irish gardener called the 
flowers Fairy Thimbles, and an English servant, 
Pops — this from the well-known habit of popping 
the petals on the palm of the hand. We used to 
build little columns of these Foxgloves by thrusting 
one within another, alternating purple and white ; 
and we wore them for gloves, and placed them as 
foolscaps on the heads of tiny dolls. The beauty 
of the Foxglove in the garden is unquestioned ; the 
spires of white bloom are, as Cotton Mather said of 
a pious and painful Puritan preacher, “a shining 
and white light in a golden candlestick improved for 
the sweet felicity of Mankind and to the honour 
of our Maker.” 
Opposite page 340 is a glimpse of a Box-edged 
garden in Worcester, whose blossoming has been a 
delight to me every summer of my entire life. In 
my childhood this home was that of flower-loving 
neighbors who had an established and constant sys- 
tem of exchange with my mother and other neigh- 
bors of flowers, plants, seeds, slips, and bulbs. The 
garden was serene with an atmosphere of worthy old 
age ; you wondered how any man so old could so 
constantly plant, weed, prune, and hoe until you 
saw how he loved his flowers, and how his wife loved 
them. The Roses, Peonies, and Flower de Luce 
in this garden are sixty years old, and the Box also ; 
the shrubs are almost trees. Nothing seems to be 
