The Paris daisy is splendidly healthy and 
-free-flowering. In either yellow or white 
it makes a desirable plant for indoor bloom 
I T is usually true, I think, that the real out¬ 
door garden enthusiast has only a tepid 
interest in house plants. He feels small con¬ 
cern for the Boston fern and the ubiquitous 
rubber plant, and the umbrella palm rouses 
no enthusiasm in his soul. 
Is this to be wondered at ? There is noth¬ 
ing very inspiring about any of these, nor 
about the rest of the list of “house plants” 
as they are commonly known and grown. 
They are respectable and dull and bourgeois; 
and, correspondingly, they are a bore. 
Yet it must be acknowledged that not 
everything that will grow in the house 
is to be relegated to this category; and 
if one really wants to have an in-the- 
house garden, there are things that will 
make it interesting and delightful, even 
to the hitherto frigid. It is all a matter 
of choosing and preparedness. 
Requirements for Indoor Gardening 
The beginning of indoor horticulture 
must be exactly what the beginning is 
outdoors:—thorough preparation. This 
does not mean elaborate or expensive 
equipment; but it does mean general 
preparedness. It means a table or a 
bench to work on where earth may be 
spilled and left spilled; a place where 
spraying may be done and water spat¬ 
tered and splashed, and no more harm 
done than spattering and splashing out- 
of-doors would do; and such an ar¬ 
rangement of the pots or boxes where¬ 
in the plants grow as will make water¬ 
ing a simple operation, unaccompanied 
by the necessity for mopping and mess¬ 
ing around generally after every genu¬ 
ine indulgence in it. 
But how is all this to be attained 
when perhaps only the sunny windows 
of a living-room are available for 
plants ? And when there is no concrete 
or hard earth floor, as in a greenhouse ? 
And when water will splash, and dirt 
Fuchsias never seem to lose their popular¬ 
ity as house-plants. The odd shape of their 
flowers and their varied colors are both 
attractive 
When it comes to begonias, there are many 
more than 57 varieties from which to 
choose. They belong to a unique family 
will scatter, no matter how carefully you 
handle them, or in what quantities ? 
My first impulse is to say that if the par¬ 
ticular sunny window of the living-room is 
the only sunny window in it, don’t have the 
plants. But perhaps that is a cowardly an¬ 
swer ; let us turn to the possibilities which lie 
in wheeled tables, such as the convenient 
little tea-wagons, only less finished and 
elegant while not lacking strength. 
The position of a wheeled table may easily 
be shifted daily, opening up the sunny win¬ 
dow at times and giving every side of the 
garden the advantages of light, which 
is the next best thing to the overhead 
light of the greenhouse. Then it may 
be wheeled out bodily, this entire in- 
the-house garden, for spraying, when 
this is necessary ; and by a plan which I 
shall later outline, the drainage from 
watering may be taken care of so that 
never a drop overflows. Then a shelf 
underneath will provide storage for all 
the implements required, and the fer¬ 
tilizer and insecticides, as well as a 
small watering pot and a little bulb 
sprayer. This leaves only the potting 
bench and its pile of potting soil to be 
provided for somewhere. 
The only possible provision for these 
is a large table drawer as nearly the full 
size of the table top as you can have it, 
a drawer with a stop which will pre¬ 
vent its being pulled all the way out, 
and a supporting leg for its outer edge 
when it is in use, like the fold-back leg 
for the drop leaf on some old-fashioned 
tables. Such a drawer will not hold a 
very great amount of potting earth, yet 
enough can be kept in it to meet ordi¬ 
nary requirements. When drawn out, 
it becomes the potting bench, which is 
closed away out of sight and mind 
when not in actual use. 
All of this equipment will, of course, 
make the table pretty heavy ; but a com- 
