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268 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
April, 1913 
only could bring myself to work hard enough until then! 
How much hope goes into a hotbed in late March, or early, 
April! How much warmth the friendly manure down under the 
soil sends up by night to germinate the seeds, though the weather 
go back to winter outside—as it invariably does in our mountains ! 
Last year, for example, we had snow on the ninth of April, and 
again on the twenty-third and twenty-ninth, while the year be¬ 
fore, on the ninth, six inches fell. In the lowland regions garden¬ 
ing is easier, perhaps, but yet there is a certain joy in this fickle 
spring weather of ours, the joy of going out in the morning 
across a white garden and sweeping the snow from the hotbed 
mats, lifting the moist, steaming glass, and catching from within, 
strong against your face, the pungent warmth and aroma of the 
heated soil and the delicate fragrance of young seedlings. How 
fast the seeds come—some of them! Others come so slowly 
that the amateur gardener 
is in despair, and angrily 
decides to try a new seed 
house next year. The 
vegetable frames are sown 
in rows—celery, tomatoes, 
cauliflowers, lettuce, rad¬ 
ishes, peppers, coming up 
in tiny green ribbons, the 
radishes racing ahead. 
The flower frames, how¬ 
ever, are sowm in squares, 
each about a foot across, 
and each labeled and 
marked oft" with a thin 
strip of wood. These are 
the early plantings of the 
annuals, for we cannot 
sow out-of-doors till the 
first or even the second 
week in May in our 
climate. Sometimes, in¬ 
deed, we do not dare to 
sow even in the frames 
till well into April. The 
asters are usually up first, 
racing the weeds. The 
little squares make, in a 
week or so, a green check¬ 
erboard, each promising 
its quota of color to the 
garden, and very soon the 
early cosmos, thinned to 
the strongest plants, has 
shot up like a miniature 
forest, towering over the 
lowlier seedlings, some¬ 
times bumping its head 
against the glass before it 
can be transplanted to the 
open ground in May. But most prolific, most promising, and 
most bothersome, are the squares labeled “antirrhinum,” coral 
red, salmon pink, white, dark maroon, and so on; tiny seeds scat¬ 
tered on the ground and sprinkled with a little sand, they come up 
by the hundred, and each seedling has to go into a pot before it 
goes into the ground. 
1 here is work for an April day! I sit on a board by the hot¬ 
bed, cross-legged like a Turk, while the sun is warm on my neck 
and I feel my arms tanning, and removing a mass of the seed¬ 
lings on a flat mason's trowel, I lift each strong plant between 
thumb and finger, its long, delicate white root dangling like a 
needle, and pot it in a small paper pot. When two score pots are 
ready, I set them in a coldframe, sprinkle them, stretch the kink 
out of my back, listen to the wood thrush a moment (he came on 
the fourteenth and is evidently planning to nest in our pines), and 
then return to my job. Patience is required to pot four or five 
hundred snapdragons; but patience is required, after all, in most 
things that are rightly performed. I think as I work of the 
glory around my sundial in July, I arrange and rearrange the 
colors in my mind—and presently the job is done! 
But the steaming manure pile is not the only sign of spring, 
nor the hotbeds the only things to be attended to. If they only 
were, how much easier gardening would be—and how much less 
exciting! There is always work to be done in the orchard, for 
instance, some pruning and scraping. I always go into the 
orchard on the first really warm, spring-like March day, with a 
common hoe, and scrape a little, not so much for the good of the 
trees as the good of my 
soul. There is a curious, 
faintly putrid smell to old 
or bruised apple wood, 
which is stirred by my 
scraping, and that smell 
sweeps over me a wave of 
memories, -memories of 
childhood in a great, yel¬ 
low house that stood back 
from the road almost in 
its orchard, and boasted 
a cupola with panes of 
colored glass which made 
the familiar landscape 
strange; memories of 
youth in that same house, 
too, dim memories “of 
sweet, forgotten, wistful 
things.” My early spring- 
afternoons in the orchard 
are very precious to me 
now, and when the weath¬ 
er permits I always try to 
burn the rubbish and dead 
prunings on Good Friday, 
the incense of the apple 
wood floating across the 
brown garden like a pray¬ 
er, the precious ashes 
sinking down to enrich 
the soil. 
The bees, too, are al¬ 
ways a welcome sign of 
the returning season, 
hardly less than the birds, 
though the advent of the 
white-throated sparrow 
(who delayed till April 
twenty-first last year) is 
always a great event. He is first heard most often before break¬ 
fast, in an apple tree close to the sleeping porch, his flute-like 
triplets sweetly penetrating my dreams and oringing me gladl; 
out of bed—something he alone can do, by the way, and not evei 
he after the first morning! But the bees come long before. The 
earliest record I have is March thirty-first, but there must be 
dates before that which I have neglected to put down. Some 
house plant, a hyacinth possibly, is used as bait, and when the 
ground is thawing out beneath a warm spring sun we put the 
plant on the southern veranda and watch. Day after day nothing 
happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcely been set on the 
ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous with bees. 
In the sheltered lowlands where the ground has frozen deep the snow still lingers 
in worn, dirt-stained patches, though the first spring flowers are in bloom 
