CON VENTioN—B etter axe happier Homes. 179 
well almost evmr 3 "where; and that when grown they are among the 
most beautiful trees upon the American continent. I refer, of 
course, to the S 2 :)reading elm, and the maples, both hard and soft. 
And then the smaller shrubbery is so easy to be obtained, and it 
adds so much to the beauty as well as the comfort of a home, that 
I am sometimes surprised that any farmer will content himself with 
none at all. Even a few bushes of the common lilac and snowball 
would make a vast improvement; and surely no man in the north¬ 
west, who styles himself a farmer, should be unable to make and 
keep in condition a nice yard of grass about his house. A bed of 
flowers, be they ever so common and be it ever so small, is an abso¬ 
lute necessity. Perhaps you will not care for it yourself for the 
first year or two, but after that, you would be almost as unwilling 
to do without them as any member of your family. 
The garden should be a place of beauty as well as of profit; not 
simply a spot of ground Avhere there are a few early potatoes and 
corn, and possibly a few other things planted, and after having 
been hoed once or twice left to struggle as best they can with an 
enormous growth of weeds. A number of years since, I visited a 
friend who owned one of the most beautiful as well as one of the 
I 
best farms of its size that I ever saw. I was telling him about a 
very large crop of melons that I then had nearly or quite ready for 
market. Pie said he did not see w'hy his vines did not grow. 
There were no weeds among the hills, as he had them all pulled up 
only a few days since; and yet they did not grow and he should 
have no melons. I knew that he had a beautiful spot for a garden, 
and that it was very rich; and I went out with him to see if I could 
get any information as to the cause of failure. Well, there were 
his vines, feeble and puny, each hill having a space of ground from 
two to three feet in diameter, from which the weeds had evidently 
been pulled up within the last ten days. The balance of the 
ground was covered with a growth of weeds from four to six feet in 
height, and as thick as they could grow, and the ground almost as 
hard as the road. And he wondered why his vines did not grow. 
His other garden crops were in a similar condition; and yet I 
scarcely know’ of any person wdio enjoyed the products of a good 
garden better than his family and himself. 
Now why is this? Why is it that so many of our farmers fail to 
have anything that by any stretch of imagination can be called a 
