The Garden, You, and I | Page 7

and scientifically prepared compost. This is a matter
that both simplifies and guarantees better success to the woman who is
her own gardener and lives in a country sufficiently open for her to be
able to collect soil of various qualities for special purposes. Lilies were
always a very uncertain quantity with me, until the idea occurred of
filling my bed with earth from a meadow edge where _Lilium
Canadense_, year after year, mounted her chimes of gold and copper
bells on leafy standards often four feet high.
We may read and listen to cultural ways and methods, but when all is
said and done, one who has not a fat purse for experiments and failures
must live the outdoor life of her own locality to get the best results in
the garden.
Then to have a woman friend to compare notes with and prove rules by
is a comforting necessity. No living being can say positively, "I will do
so and so;" or "I know," when coming in contact with the wise old
earth!

Lavinia Cortright has only had a garden for half a dozen summers, and
consults me as a veteran, yet I'm discovering quite as much from her
experiments as she from mine. Last winter, when seed-catalogue time
came round, and we met daily and scorched our shoes before the fire,
drinking a great deal too much tea in the excitement of making out our
lists, we resolved to form a horticulture society of only three members,
of which she elected me the recording secretary, to be called "The
Garden, You, and I."
We expect to have a variety of experiences this season, and frequent
meetings both actual and by pen, for Lavinia, in combination with
Horace and Sylvia Bradford, last year built a tiny shore cottage, three
miles up the coast, at Gray Rocks, where they are going for alternate
weeks or days as the mood seizes them, and they mean to try
experiments with real seashore gardening, while Evan proposes that we
should combine pleasure with business in a way to make frequent
vacations possible and take driving trips together to many lovely
gardens both large and small, to our mutual benefit, his eyes being open
to construction and landscape effect, and mine to the soul of the garden,
as it were; for he is pleased to say that a woman can grasp and translate
this more easily and fully than a man. What if the records of The
Garden, You, and I should turn into a real book, an humble shadow of
"Six of Spades" of jovial memory! Is it possible that I am about to be
seized with Agamemnon Peterkin's ambition to write a book to make
the world wise? Alas, poor Agamemnon! When he had searched the
woods for an oak gall to make ink, gone to the post-office, after hours,
to buy a sheet of paper, and caused a commotion in the neighbourhood
and rumour of thieves by going to the poultry yard with a lantern to
pluck a fresh goose quill for a pen, he found that he had nothing to say,
and paused--thereby, at least, proving his own wisdom.
I'm afraid I ramble too much to be a good recording secretary, but this
habit belongs to my very own garden books that no critical eyes can see.
That reminds me! Father says that he met Bartram Penrose in town last
week and that he seemed rather nervous and tired, and worried about
nothing, and wanted advice. After looking him over a bit, father told
him that all he needed was a long vacation from keeping train, as well

as many other kinds of time, for it seems during the six years of his
marriage he has had no real vacation but his honeymoon.
Mary Penrose's mother, my mother, and Lavinia Cortright were all
school friends together, and since Mary married Bartram and moved to
Woodridge we've exchanged many little visits, for our husbands agree,
and now that she has time she is becoming an enthusiastic gardener,
after my own heart, having last season become convinced of the
ugliness of cannas and coleus beds about a restored colonial farmhouse.
Why might they not join us on our driving trips, by way of their
vacation?
Immediately I started to telephone the invitation, and then paused. I
will write instead. Mary Penrose is on the long-distance line,--toll thirty
cents in the daytime! In spring I am very stingy; thirty cents means six
papers of flower seeds, or three heliotropes. Whereas in winter it is
simply thirty cents, and it must be a very vapid conversation indeed
that is not worth so much on a dark winter day of the quality when
neither driving nor walking is pleasant, and if you get sufficiently close
to