The Garden 
that We Made 
soil and everything else is expressly prepared for them. 
Here is indeed a proof that flowers thrive when their 
owners love them. For my little girl is so fond of 
roses that she admires every opening bud. More than 
that she has not done for them, I confess ; but for 
some unexplainable reason her roses are always the 
finest, and she is always coming to one or another 
of us with very choice specimens of roses from her own 
bushes. 
One year my little girl had got the idea that she wanted 
everlasting tlowers in her garden, so that she could take 
something from her garden that she could keep through 
the winter. A bunch of everlasting flowers in a vase in 
her little room would remind her in Stockholm of her 
garden down in the south of Sweden. 
The perennial yellow poppies were sown in the garden, 
and these shed a quantity of seeds from which, in August, 
fresh seedling plants come up round the parent plant. 
This was precisely what my little girl had discovered when 
she was quite a tiny tot. Without a word to anyone, she 
carefully removed some of the young seedlings, and we 
found them planted in quite a different part of the garden. 
She had discovered how the transplanting should be done, 
and was duly proud of her achievement. 
On the whole, I think girls have a greater liking for 
gardening than boys. From their earliest years onwards, 
boys prefer such manly occupations as bridge-building or 
the construction of forts. 
Yet it would be unfair to assert that no boys like 
gardening. I remember how a boy cousin and I roved far 
into the woods and along meadows to look for flowers. He 
was then about eight, and quite an adept in making 
bouquets, and we used to compete as to who could make 
up the prettiest one for the breakfast table of our grand- 
mother — Queen Victoria. 
We were also competitors in learning the names of 
flowers. That was how I got to love flowers even as a 
child. The English names are often so much more 
o 
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