Ill 
SPUING WORK 
69 
daily food. Some things, like groundsel, which 
you very likely bring into the house for your 
canary birds, are easy to pull up, but others 
want quite a fight to remove them. Oh, how 
I have tugged and pulled at the twisted roots 
of nettle in my wild garden, following the 
stringy yellow fibres a yard or more along the 
ground ; or worse still have been my struggles 
with “ground elder,” which made its way 
everywhere. It was a yearly toil, but at last I 
conquered, and made the weeds understand 
that although wild, yet it was a flower and not 
a “bear garden,” and they had no place there. 
Another important reason why much weeding 
should be done in the spring is because, if left 
till later in the year, some of the weeds would 
flower, and then, as you know, follows seed, 
and for every weed you have one spring, you 
might easily have a hundred the next. The 
soft yellow little tufts on the groundsel are the 
flowers, and very soon, if left to grow, there 
would be quantities of fluffy white seeds like 
tiny thistledown being blown all over the 
garden and taking root and growing in all the 
best places. It has been said that to be a 
good gardener you must have “ a cast-iron back 
with a hinge in it,” and certainly the aches and 
pains after a day’s weeding make one long for 
one ; but such trifles must not discourage. I 
