198 
CHILDREN'S GARDENS 
VI 
more complete the study of botanical life, the 
more will the love for everything in a garden 
increase. 
The winter will have been well employed if 
it leaves you determined to watch your flowers 
more attentively, to study their wants more 
carefully—in fact, to make better friends with 
them and learn to know them and all their 
ways and peculiarities, and appreciate all the 
wonders of their growth and existence. 
There is nothing else I can tell you to do 
in mid-winter when the snow is on the ground 
except to enjoy the Christmas tree in the 
house, and the red holly berries and the green 
mistletoe. But with the new year comes new 
life, and before the first month has passed away 
some plants will be peeping out. Christmas 
roses, which are often still in buds, hidden 
among their large dark-green leaves at Yule- 
tide, open their pure white blooms as the days 
lengthen in January. Winter aconites seem 
to herald the spring long before warm days 
have really come, with their sunny golden 
flowers, each set in a natural frill of brilliant 
green. But the true child of winter is the 
snowdrop. It pierces its way through the cold 
hard ground, and with the first gleam of pale 
winter sunshine that softens the frost-bound 
earth it shakes out its dainty white and green 
