HOUSE AND GARDEN 
April, 1911 
time the friends arrived. But they had the prophetic eyes of 
poets, and when, shod with galoshes, they plowed through the mud 
of their future terrace they could imagine all the beauty we had 
intended, and almost wept with gratitude, and were perfectly 
docile about breakfasting indoors. 
The Terrace was eventually finished — I ought to know, because 
I laid thirty feet of stone wall (which I find out by the dictionary 
should be called a “Ha-Ha,” though I never suspected it had such 
a mirthful name at that skinned-thumb time), and we planted it 
with hundreds of tulips, thousands of hyacinths, a million crocus, 
and a trillion grass-seed and six Dorothy Perkins. The next year 
when the dear friends came again the Terrace was too beautiful 
to breakfast upon; they could only stand at a respectful distance 
with bared heads while it was formally dedicated. 
There also is the rose-garden annex, planned for the aforesaid 
partner’s birthday, he being prohibited from constitutionaling in 
that portion of our realm for days. When the first of June ar¬ 
rived there stood — well, I won’t say exactly the number, but if I 
had been a prosaic person I would have purchased just the same 
number of candles to stick on a short-lived birthday cake, as I 
planted roses in the abiding chocolate cake of the ground. 
Of course every true gardener saves his own seed, thereby grad¬ 
ually bringing all the dififerent varieties to greater perfection, and 
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incidentally he may name these self-developed brands after 
otherwise unfamed friends. 
Whenever there is a particularly eccentric or beautiful color 
shown in a blossom, I tie a tape about it, and write its praise on 
the tape, so that when the seed is harvested a fickle memory need 
not be relied upon. By saving each year the very darkest holly¬ 
hock of the blackish variety, I finally achieved the actually black 
flowers, and had a chance to evidence my admiration of a certain 
friend’s hair (not her character) by bestowing her name on the 
hollyhock. 
If a man has an extravagant wife who cannot resist Irish lace 
robes when displayed on a lay-lady in a department store window, 
he should just gently lead her to the country, present her with two 
acres, or one and a-half, of ground, introduce her to flower cata¬ 
logues and teach her to dig. She’ll soon forget manicurists. It’s 
the simplest general cure of all feminine weaknesses I know of. 
No woman, once demoralized into a gardener, ever hesitated 
when confronted with a choice between a new gown and—well, 
say all the peonies, peach trees, roses and rhubarb plants the same 
amount would purchase. No wonder the first woman gardener 
could only afford the fig-leaf; all her clothes money went for 
anemones and more apple trees. One can only measure their 
change by retrospection; when a backward glance produces a finer 
“I don’t believe any living creatures could remain bad if they associated daily with flowers, for flowers have such an Irish way of seducing with 
blarney of beauty to the simple, real and only abiding things of life” 
