V 
AUTUMN 
149 
they will last all the winter indoors. It is very 
nice to have a few of these dry bouquets when 
there are no flowers in the garden, but it is 
better still to take some little plant into the 
house and grow it there. If you sow the seed 
of a marguerite carnation in the early spring, it 
will grow into a fair-sized plant and flower in 
your garden in the summer. When the days 
begin to get cold, you can dig it up and put it 
in a pot and keep it indoors, and it will go on 
flowering all the winter. If you have not 
prepared any plants for transplanting, you 
might still collect a few horse-chestnuts and 
acorns when they are ripe and drop off the 
trees, and put them in a soup plate or a saucer 
with some moss over them, with just a little 
earth at the bottom of the plate. Keep them 
moist, not too wet, or they will get mouldy, and 
stand the plate somewhere in the house, and 
they will form a pretty little forest in the spring, 
and you will find much interest in watching 
them growing when nature out of doors is 
asleep. 
Gardeners must be always looking ahead, 
as, if they did not prepare for summer and 
autumn in the early spring, there would be no 
flowers when the warm weather came, and 
nothing to cheer the closing days of the year. 
You must in the same way get ready for the 
