HOUSE AND GARDEN 
104 
February, 
1914 
but the fact that such a gathering of plants is a matter of dis¬ 
criminative selection, and is coincident more or less with the hap¬ 
penings of one’s own life and the growth of one’s own interests, 
makes it all the more a garden worth the making. To preserve 
it from the charge of freakishness, regard should, of course, be 
had to beauty as well as to historic import or personal association; 
and, as additions are made from time to time and thinning out be¬ 
comes needful, the elimination should 
be of the more conventional. So will 
the garden become increasingly as a 
library of the flower of literature, fra¬ 
grant with the old romance of life and 
rich in the immortal spirit of an un¬ 
commercial past. 
Of course, if one does not care to 
make this idea the general feature of 
the garden a certain portion of the 
space may be set aside for it—a sort 
of Poets’ Corner, given over exclu¬ 
sively to plants distinguished in song 
and story. Many plants have a really 
extensive literature. Outside of gen¬ 
eral literature, works like Britten and 
Holland’s “Dictionary of Plant 
Names,” Prior’s “Popular Names of 
British Plants,” DeCandolle’s “Origin 
of Cultivated Plants,” and Thiselton- 
Dyer’s “The Folk Lore of Plants” — to 
mention a few among many — are excellent introductions to the 
recorded history of numerous herbs and shrubs which are either 
already garden subjects or might well become such. 
In addition to those flowers that are memorable for their asso¬ 
ciation with places, there are many which, if picked up during 
one’s vacation 
ramblings, bring 
back pleasant 
memories of those 
trips. Many 0 f 
the desert flowers 
are odd, as well 
as beautiful, 
showing forth in 
this pure wilder¬ 
ness of the desert 
unlooked-for re¬ 
semblances to 
many things of 
man’s complex 
civilization. There 
is the salaria, for 
instance, with vel- 
v e t y blue-and- 
white-hooded co- 
r 0 11 a emerging 
from a loose, pa¬ 
pery calyx and 
looking in out¬ 
line astonishingly 
like a bonneted 
Quaker lady of the olden time. And there is Calyptridium 
monandrum (we would write its English name if it had one), a 
Wild West cousin of the familiar “pusley.” It does not drop its 
petals, but when the seed vessel is set, lo and behold! the withered 
coralla appears like a limp liberty cap swinging at the tip of the 
slender red pod. There is, too, a remarkable milkweed with 
blossoms of imperial purple so smothered in white wool that the 
individual flowers suggest rubies lying in a bed of jeweler’s cotton. 
And there is Nama demissum, which grows in a circle flat upon 
the sand, and resembles a floral wheel with green spokes and a 
Tyrian purple tire. The list might be continued indefinitely. 
The struggle for moisture in the desert leads the roots of many 
plants straight downward. Those of the spiny dalea, a shrub or 
little tree whose intricacy of slender branchlets becomes clothed in 
spring with a royal garment of a 
myriad purple blossoms, are said some¬ 
times to. descend twenty feet or more 
in quest of water. An old desert 
dweller once told me that, desiring one 
of these trees as an ornament near his 
house, he set an Indian to dig it up, 
cautioning him on no account to break 
the tap root. As he rode to and fro 
on various errands he noticed the In¬ 
dian patiently digging deeper and 
deeper, his body gradually getting 
lower and lower in the big hole, until 
a couple of days afterward the black 
head of the child of the desert was 
just visible at the level of the ground. 
Thinking the tree had earned a right to 
its station, he told the red man to let: 
it stand. 
The cactuses, on the other hand, 
those best known of desert plants, 
have but a scanty root system, and one can without much difficulty 
topple some sorts over with his foot. Their aqueous reservoirs, 
being within their succulent joints and stems above ground, they 
do not need long roots to fetch and carry for them. There is a 
great variety of the cactus blooms, and some that are not particu¬ 
larly beautiful in 
themselves pos¬ 
sess a charm in 
their arrange¬ 
ment. Of these 
latter, the green¬ 
ish-yellow flowers 
of the strange, 
cylindrical bisna- 
gas, or barrel cac¬ 
tus, are examples. 
They form a cir¬ 
cle upon the spiny 
top of the keg- 
1 i k e plan t—a 
chaplet set upon 
those repellent 
brows by the 
hand of a Love 
that must indeed 
be divine. The 
spines of the cac¬ 
tuses are a fasci- 
n a t i n g study. 
There is much 
variety in them, 
and often great beauty. Their placing upon the surface of the 
plants is no haphazard arrangement, as might appear to the unob¬ 
serving, but is in accord with an orderly plan. Those of the 
bisnaga consist of regularly disposed bundles, the central spines of 
each of which are very prominent, four in number and trans¬ 
versely ridged, one of the four being usually curved in the shape 
of a great fishhook, and beautifully colored. 
Fennel, artichokes and carrot fill a conglomerate but pleasing 
A general view of a garden of associations, where each plant, by a process of time and judicious selection, has 
come to have a deeper value than its mere color, perfume or form 
