86 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
—-—■—■— - - — 
THOUGHTS FROM MY GARDEN SEAT. 
Morning-glories! —One, two, three, four, 
five varieties! pale blue, white, pink, dark 
purple,flowing crimson, and white flecked 
with blue and crimson—airy as the clouds, 
with a living, transparent brightness in their 
cups, as if they were woven of light and air. 
Other flowers have their days, some their 
weeks, of gradual development—of nature 
fullness—of slow decay; the mornig-glory is 
new every morning. It has only a few 
fresh hours, and then closes forever, and in¬ 
stead of a half-withered, slowly-decaying 
flower, lo ! to-morrow, we have all new ones, 
sprung as by one magic touch from the womb 
of night. Ages ago, the Hebrew poet said 
of the fairest and only One, the source and 
essence of all beauty, His mercies are new 
every morning. 
These morning-glories, in their unvalued 
commonness, and yet their strange, ethereal 
beauty, are a living emblem of that daily love 
which God shows us daily, when we wake 
from the seeming death of sleep to a new 
lease of life—a new present of all its adorn¬ 
ments and comforts. 
Our garden is a perfect jungle of petunias 
—that flower so encouraging to the souls of 
immature gardeners, so hopeful, so hardy, 
so full of vanity, so persistent in bloom that 
no exuberance can possibly exhaust it. We 
have taken from the ground a petunia that 
has been flaunting its blossoms all summer, 
cut it down for our winter window-garden, 
and seen it bloom there with new vigor ali 
winter ; and when spring came, go back into 
the ground and flower on all summer, with¬ 
out one pause suggestive of weariness. Ah ! 
how few among our living friends are there 
that correspond to petunias. 
Verbenas also are an encouraging growth, 
requiring only sunshine enough for untiring 
bloom. People with shaded borders should 
eschew them, for they will not blossom with¬ 
out a plenary fullness of sunlight. Too much 
sun and heat they scarce can have, and they 
lift their heads to it with an exultant glow ; 
they are like rich, poetic, artistic natures, 
which revel in congenial warmth and culture, 
but become wilted, bloomles and stinted, in 
cold, shaded, ungenial situations. Many 
persons can no more be judged of, in such 
situation, than can the verbenas which some 
of our neighbors are fond of plantingin shady 
borders under the drip of over-arching trees. 
“ I see no beauty about the thing,” they say ; 
“ it’s a miserable, yellow, lank-growing vine, 
without form or comeliness.” Yet, friend, 
give it sunshine, and you will see what it 
can do. Some of the most goregous and 
splendid natures may have, all their lives in 
this world, passed for miserable failures— 
simply because the sunshine of congeniality 
and opportunity never awakened what was 
in them to bloom ; and there may in the fu¬ 
ture life be glorious blossoms on plants which 
seemed poor and stunted here. 
But, oh, these weeds! What! only a 
week since garden beds and alleys were 
faithfully cleaned, and now behold ! 
Yet one word about these weeds. A friend 
said to us the other day, Does it not seem a 
piece of impertinence to seize on a piece of 
ground and vehemently uproot and destroy 
everything that nature inclines to place there 
and insist on the growth of something which 
apparently she cares very little about 1 Who 
does not see that mignonette, larkspurs and 
cypress vines are not nature’s pets'? She 
expresses herself with a far more hearty 
energy in burdock, pigweed and smartweed. 
These are her thrifty children; our so- 
called flowers are her step-sons, penuriously 
and grudgingly brought up. What makes 
one thing a weed and another a flower ? We 
have seen growing, in trodden paths by the 
sand and dust of the wayside, weeds fairer 
than some greenhouse nurslings. The weed 
of one count ry is the cherished exotic of 
another. Our mullein flourishes in English 
gardens under the cognomen of the Ameri¬ 
can velvet plant, and the wild heath of her 
moors is our greenhouse nursling. 
We have thought sometimes that flowers, 
could they speak, would complain of this 
capricious standard of valuation. But the 
same thing runs through the living world. 
There is one Mrs. A. who is broad and fat, a 
coarse talker, a loud laugher, a heavy feeder, 
and there is another Mrs. A. who is just the 
same—but the world calls one of them a 
flower and the other a weed. One is the 
rich Mrs. A. and the other is the poor Mrs. 
A., and that makes all the difference. One 
is designated as cm bon point —the other as 
broad and fat. One is insufferably vulgar— 
the other is “ so peculiar and original;” in 
short, one is the garden plant and the other 
the roadside weed. 
We confess to certain remorseful yearn¬ 
ings in favor of weeds, when we observe 
the persistent assiduity with which nature 
endeavors to give them a foothold in the 
world. How is a believer in universal tol¬ 
eration and freedom of development to re¬ 
concile it to his conscience to give pigweed 
and purslane no chance ? Pigweed has his 
esthetic merits ; his leaf is elegant; in good 
soil he becometh soon a shapely shrub. 
Whoso will pxamine the pink leaves of a 
very young pigweed through a microscope, 
will find them frosted with a glittering in¬ 
crustation of the most brilliant beauty. A 
few sparkles of dew lying cradled in those 
pink leaves have often stayed our hand in 
full process of weeding, and raised the query, 
Why should this be only a weed? About 
smartweed, now, the question is easily an¬ 
swered. He has no graces, no fine points ; 
his leaves of a dingy hue with dull spots— 
his flower of a dirty pink—his odor coarse 
and rank ; all declare him to be a weed by 
nature as well as position. 
One of our own ideas of a garden is a 
certain wild abandon or freedom of growth, 
similar to what one sees in woods and hedges. 
Trim gardens, where every plant is propped 
and tied, and divided with exactest care, 
have their own beauty, but there is (so at 
least we hope) beauty also in dense masses 
of flowers which grow, and twine, and mingle 
together as if nature had planted them. Per¬ 
force, such has been the shape of our own 
gardening affairs ; our beds are so full that 
the ground is scarcely to be seen ; flowers 
i 
lean over each other—vines intertwine, they 
mat, and run, and blossom in each other's 
embrace, as if they grew in a meadow. Here 
and there a hardy weed, if he have any pre¬ 
possessing points, is allowed a niche, unless 
some amateur young gardener, zealous for 
etiquette, pulls him up in our absence. Hum¬ 
ming-birds and sparrows come and go among 
our flowers, every day, as we explore the 
jungle, we find some new development. 
This humming-bird—child of air and light! 
winged jewel! ethereal vision! what shall 
we say of him? Suppose some good, cluck¬ 
ing hen, as she scratches in the garden, 
'should deliver to her chicks an opinion of 
him. Standing on one leg, with her eye 
cocked upward, she watches his gyrations as 
he dips first at the coral tubes of the honey¬ 
suckle, and then dances through beds of pe¬ 
tunias and verbenas. “ See, my children,” 
she says, “ what absurd, irrational conduct! 
Did you ever see me do so ? What if I should 
go flying about, pecking honeysuckle blos¬ 
soms ? Don’t tell me that a bird can live on 
such fare as that! Don’t it take corn-meal, 
potatoes and worms to keep us alive, and 
can a living be got by figuring round among 
roses and jessamins ? What utter neglect 
of all solid tastes and pursuits ! If I had the 
bringing up of that creature, she should learn 
to scratch and eat corn-meal as a rational 
bird should ! Don’t tell me about her fine 
colors—all trumpery ! and graceful motions 
—pah! what are they good for ? do they dig 
a single worm, or hatch a single chicken ?” 
Many of the judgments which human 
beings pass on each other are about as sen¬ 
sible as this. H. B. S.—Independent. 
Destroying Bee Moths—A simple meth¬ 
od purposed. —Mr. Garnsey, in the Genesee 
Farmer, recommends raising the hive an 
inch from the bench by placing small blocks 
under the corners ; and carefully fill every 
crevice in the bench so as to deprive the 
moths of their usual hiding places. Next 
take a little board, say three by six inches, 
and one-half inch in thickness, and with a 
knife or some other sharp instrument cut it 
full of grooves upon one side; let the grooves 
extend through half the thickness of the 
board. Thus prepared, slide it under the 
hive, the grooved side down. This furnish¬ 
es the moth with exactly such a place as 
they desire, and all you have to do is to re¬ 
move your trap from one to three times a 
week, and destroy what you find in it. Small 
rods of elder, divided lengthwise and the pith 
removed, will answer, though not as well as 
a board with grooves in it. This remedy 
can be tested without the least expense. 
Let all those who may have occasion or op¬ 
portunity give it a trial, and satisfy them¬ 
selves whether it will pay to practice it or 
not. 
To Cure Hams. —First ascertain what is 
the matter with them. Then apply the 
proper remedy, and if you do not succeed in 
curing them, it isn’t your fault. 
An auctioneer does as he is lid, a post¬ 
master as he is directed! 
