58 
House b" Garden 
McFarland 
The care of plants 
in a greenhouse to 
produce such a 
winter floral dis¬ 
play as this re¬ 
quires no more 
work than creating 
it in the garden. 
It is the finest 
of winter hobbies 
WITHIN THE CRYSTAL GARDEN 
The Small Greenhouse Is the Surest Cure for 
the Discontent of Long Winter Months 
I T isn’t the mystic creation of some 
Arabia.n Nights imagination, this crystal 
garden. No—it is a perfectly tangible, 
man-made thing, a greenhouse; and its 
inmates are flowers and fruits and whatever 
other of the good, green, growing things of 
Nature you may care to place therein. The 
only magic about it is its ability to provide 
that same incomparable solace which makes 
of outdoor gardening one of the most 
cherished of all our earthly privileges. 
There is something a bit uninspiring 
about the word “greenhouse”. Hearing it, 
one thinks of superheated, enervating air, 
of the peculiar dankness of half-rotted wood, 
of endless yards of unemotional glass and 
frames and carnations or roses that dull the 
sensibilities by their very predominance. 
A sense of frank commercialism pervades 
the greenhouse as most of us know it; 
unconsciously we think of its flowers in 
terms of prices per dozen. Not by the 
wildest stretch of the imagination can we 
compare it to a garden. 
But that is not the sort of greenhouse 
with which this sketch deals. We are 
thinking now of a true garden under glass, 
a place where we can plant and water and 
gather all our old outdoor favorites, whether 
of the flower or vegetable kingdom; a 
protected place in which our tender spring 
and summer blooming plants can be 
wintered. For the real crystal garden 
lengthens the flower year to a full twelve 
months and sets at nought the bitterness of 
ROBERT S. LEMMON 
the weather from Christmas until March. 
It must be a difficult thing to manage, 
you think? A millionaire’s hobby that calls 
for imported English gardeners, and a few 
extra thousand dollars for coal, and palm 
trees, and other luxuries like those? Not a 
bit of it. A thoroughly well made, capable 
small greenhouse that will last as long as 
the dwelling, costs but an extremely small 
part of a fortune. As for the imported 
plant specialist, you won’t need him at all 
if you have ordinary success yourself in 
growing things outdoors. Your crystal 
garden need not be a garden of equatorial 
exotics. The heavy coal appropriation, 
too, can go into the discard, for there are 
plenty of instances where the system that 
heats the garage or house serves at the 
same time to carry the required warmth into 
the greenhouse. Even where the green¬ 
house and its heating are a separate unit, 
the fuel consumption is negligible in com¬ 
parison to the pleasure that it affords. 
Think of those pleasures! Tall ranks of 
snapdragons or hollyhocks buttressing the 
clear gold and ochre of marigolds. Poppies 
flaming red against the white of Canter¬ 
bury bells and setting off the yellow of the 
alyssum at their feet. The stately grace of 
Madonna lilies above the pastel tints of 
annual phlox. The sky blue of forget-me- 
nots, the multicolor banners of the iris, the 
infinite array of tulips and crocuses and 
daffodils I 
Or, if you prefer, fresh vegetables and 
fruits will meet your eyes, dazzled by the 
snow glare you have just left outside: 
lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, cauliflower, 
melons, beets, peaches, grapes and pears— 
even corn and pumpkins, if there be room. 
Wliatever your particular preferences may 
be, the crystal garden stands ready to 
satisfy them. 
Not all at one time, perhaps, for not even 
the magic of a one-compartment greenhouse 
can go so far as to make cool weather 
plants thrive perfectly beside those which 
call for a dozen or two degrees of additional 
heat. But granting only that the general 
temperature requirements are met, all 
things that you can do in the outdoor soil 
can be reproduced—and often improved— 
under glass. 
For consider these points: Unseasonably 
cool waves affect the greenhouse family not 
the least—they just laugh at such matters. 
Again, a protracted rainy spell, such as 
often ruins the bean crop and causes many 
seeds to rot in the ground, is unknown 
beneath the clear glass roof. Damaging 
wind storms and burning drought count 
for not one snap of the greenhouse owner’s 
fingers. Even the ravages of insect pests 
are minimized, both because the plants are 
more likely to be under close observation 
and because the tightness of the house it¬ 
self, and the season of its greatest pro¬ 
ductiveness, work against the appearance 
of any great numbers of such enemies. 
{Continued on page 108) 
