74 
House & 
Garden 
Dodson Wren House, 
solid oak. cypress shin¬ 
gles, copper coping. 4 
compartments. 28" high, 
18" dia. Price $ 6 . 00 . 
Dodson Sexangular 
Flicker House, 16% 
inches long, 12 inches 
wide, 11 inches deep. 
Price $6.00. 
Other 
^r\ 
Put Up Dodson Houses 
for the Song Birds 
T HEY will protect your trees, shrubs, and gar¬ 
dens from noxious insects. The bluebird eats 
106 different kinds of insect pests; the flicker 
and the house wren 69 kinds. The purple martin 
will catch and eat 2,000 mosquitoes a day be¬ 
sides other flying insects. Dodson Houses attract 
them and other valuable insectivorous birds. 
Put the sturdy Dodson Houses in your garden. 
They will tone by weathering to a delightful har¬ 
mony with the surroundings. The birds will return 
to them year after year, cheering you with their 
beauty and song. 
Dodson Bird Houses are a permanent investment. 
They are built of thoroughly seasoned Red Cedar, 
Oak, Cypress, and selected White Pine. Nails and 
cleats coated to resist rust. Only pure lead and oil 
paints used. 
,T i v uu! sen t on request, illustrating Bird 
Lodge and Dodson Line, giving prices. Also 
beautiful colored bird picture free. 
Joseph H. Dodson Audubon Association 
731 Harrison Avenue Kankakee, Illinois 
Dodson Sparrow Trap guaranteed to rid your community 
of these quarrelsome pests , price $8.00 
Dodson Bluebird House, solid 
oak, cypress shingles, copper 
coping, 4 compartments. 21 
high, IS" dia. Price $6.00^ 
r--- 
iodson Purple Martin 
louse, (cottage style) 28 
ompartments, 32 x 27 
aches. Price $16.00. 
C7R nn 
Hybrid Delphiniums in an English Garden 
(Continued from page 60) 
popular and certainly, in my opinion, 
the most effective kinds are the tall hy¬ 
brids, some of which are figured in the 
picture on page 60. These are the 
perennials which make a brave show 
in all herbaceous borders and which 
have been grown of recent years to 
such perfection and in such varied hues 
that they may be said to be one of the 
favorite flowers of summertime. 
Many nurserymen in America and 
England specialize in these glorious 
things and anyone can select and buy 
them who so desires, but my particular 
experience is that it is better to raise 
them from seed. For several years 
after I had started a garden I used to 
buy a dozen or two plants from a nurs¬ 
ery, getting good clumps of each variety, 
selected in the hope that they would re¬ 
ward me the following summer with a 
fine show of bloom. The first year I 
found they did but indifferently; the 
following year most of them died out 
entirely, and it was not until I had 
many failures that I discovered that 
“good clumps” do not like being re¬ 
moved, and that a well established old 
plant is best left alone. 
People are generally in too great a 
hurry, and the desire to possess and 
grow plants without a due amount of 
waiting and of care will often end in 
disappointment. The best way to pro¬ 
cure a quantity of good delphiniums is 
to grow them from seed, and any flow¬ 
er-seed merchant will supply a good 
strain which will yield a varied mixture 
of colors. If sown in spring in frames 
or a glass house and potted up about 
March, one seedling in each pot, they 
can be planted in their permanent places 
about two months later. It should be 
in good rich soil deep enough to allow 
their roots, in dry weather, to go down 
to the moisture beneath. Some of these 
plants will flower the first year, but it 
is unwise to judge of their merit until 
they have been better established. 
Pests 
The cultivation is quite easy, as every 
gardener knows, but when the plants are 
young it is well to be constantly on the 
lookout for slugs, which eat and destroy 
the shoots. In my garden I do believe 
all the slugs from the neighborhood 
come to eat my young delphiniums 1 
They lurk in the long grass and under 
stones and come out in the night to 
do their obnoxious work. I am at per¬ 
petual warfare with these unpleasant 
creatures, and find the best way to 
keep them off is to shake a ring of 
Sanitas disinfecting powder around the 
plants when in growth. 
My first introduction to the wonder¬ 
ful flowers shown in the picture was at 
the garden of a friend in Lincolnshire 
who has for over thirty years selected 
and grown delphiniums from seed, sav¬ 
ing his own seed from his best plants 
and sowing it every year. He selected 
from his seedlings only a few of those 
he considered best, and seldom more 
than a dozen were kept out of about 
two hundred young plants. He used to 
set the seedlings in rows in a field and 
ruthlessly tear up and throw away, as 
they came into bloom, all that he con¬ 
sidered were not up to his expectations. 
The chief points he aimed at were large 
individual flowers (sometimes in cata¬ 
logs given the foolish name of “pips”), 
the truss well furnished with bloom and 
without gaps, and the blossoms having 
one color only to each flower. 
The Delphinium Painting 
The illustration at the bottom of page 
60 was painted from the result of all 
these years of work and selection. The 
dark flower on the left, all the petals of 
which were of a deep violet with a flat 
ivory-colored eye, was, in my opinion, 
one of the most effective delphiniums 
ever grown. The one next to it on the 
right was a pinkish heliotrope color, and 
its individual flowers were quite two and 
and a half incites in diameter, and very 
close together. The third one was a clear 
sky blue, as good a blue as the well- 
known Belladona, without even a sus- 
pidon of violet. 
The next smaller truss I took from a 
fine plant of a very deep blue color with 
a dark brownish eye in the middle of 
each flower, the effect of which, in the 
garden, was a very pleasing contrast to 
the more usual light centered ones. The 
smaller flower bent over on the extreme 
left was put there because it was the 
pinkest delphinium in the garden and, 
I imagine, anywhere grown. But it was 
not a good pink, being a rather washed- 
out looking creature, and personally I 
don’t like it. In time, however, we may 
raise a really good pink, one which will 
be a great addition to a collection con¬ 
taining every shade of blue and violet 
and mauve. There is a so-called white 
delphinium and I have seen it—a dirty- 
looking white, as if it had been dipped 
in mud and washed with a syringe. I 
hope amongst the one hundred and fifty 
seedlings I brought up last summer there 
will be none of this sort. If there is, 
it will certainly be among those elim¬ 
inated and thrown away. 
It is the custom for the nurseryman 
to split up or take rooted cuttings from 
his good plants and sell them under a 
name he has given to each seedling. 
These can, of course, be made to flour¬ 
ish and give satisfaction, and indeed it 
is the popular way of procuring a del¬ 
phinium collection, but I have never 
so bought them, for I find it gives a 
much greater pleasure and a greater 
variety to raise them from seed. I have 
succeeded recently in so interesting my 
gardener in this that his admiration and 
enthusiasm have caused him to plant 
rows of seedlings in the kitchen garden 
to the exclusion of so many mere cab¬ 
bages and potatoes. You can buy veg¬ 
etables, but you can’t buy such deliphin- 
iums all a-growing and a-blowing in your 
garden ! The small amount of patience re¬ 
quired for the process is well rewarded, and 
I would recommend every good gardener 
to start at once this fascinating hobby. 
Early American Household Pottery 
(Continued from page 31) 
New Jersey and in southern Connecti¬ 
cut. The quaint slip ware pie-plates, 
with their mottoes in yellow slip, smack 
of Colonial farm days—“Hard times in 
Jersey”; “Good for Amelia”; “Money 
Wanted”; “Chicken Pot Pie”; etc., while 
the pie-plates with central medallion 
portraits of George and Martha Wash¬ 
ington and of Lafayette were made in 
numbers by George Wolfgang at River 
Edge, Hackensack, N. J., about the year 
1830. All of this early Dutch pottery 
is well worth collecting. 
The early earthenware of Massa¬ 
chusetts, Virginia and the Carolinas was 
fashioned somewhat after the pottery 
made in England during the 17th Cen¬ 
tury, to which it bears a strong re¬ 
semblance. 
In Colonial Massachusetts earthen¬ 
ware was made at Peabody, Weston and 
(Continued on page 78) 
