The Garden, You, and I | Page 9

word,
you must understand; it was invented by a clever professor of
agriculture, whom Bart met not long ago, and we loved the word so
much that we have adopted it. The mental quality of Garden Goozle
seems to be compounded of summer squash and milkweed milk, and it
would be quite harmless were it not for the strong catbriers grafted in
the mass for impaling the purses of the trusting.
"Ah, if we only lived a little nearer together, near enough to talk over
the garden fence! It seems cruel to ask you to write answers to all my
questions, but after listing the hardy plants I want for putting the garden
on a consistent old-time footing, I find the amount runs quite to the
impossible three figures, aside from everything else we need, so I've
decided on beginning with a seed bed, and I want to know before we
locate the new asparagus bed how much ground I shall need for a seed
bed, what and how to plant, and everything else!

"I like all the hardy things you have, especially those that are mice, lice,
and water proof! If you will send me ever so rough a list, I shall be
grateful. Would I better begin at once or wait until July or August, as
some of the catalogues suggest?
"Bart has just come in and evidently has something on his mind of
which he wishes to relieve himself via speech.
"Your little sister of the garden,
"MARY P."
"She must join The Garden, You, and I," said Lavinia Cortright, almost
before I had finished the letter. "She will be entertainer in chief, for she
never fails to be amusing!"
"I thought there were to be but three members," I protested, thinking of
the possible complications of a three-cornered correspondence.
"Ah, well," Lavinia Cortright replied quickly, "make the Garden an
Honorary member; it is usual so to rank people of importance from
whom much is expected, and then we shall still be but three--with
privilege of adding your husband as councillor and mine as librarian
and custodian of deeds!"
So I have promised to write to Mary Penrose this evening.

III
CONCERNING HARDY PLANTS
THE SEED BED FOR HARDY FLOWERS
When the Cortrights first came to Oaklands, expecting to remain here
but a few months each summer, their garden consisted of some borders
of old-fashioned, hardy flowers, back of the house. These bounded a
straight walk that, beginning at the porch, went through an arched grape

arbour, divided the vegetable garden, and finally ended under a tree in
the orchard at the barrier made by a high-backed green wooden seat,
that looked as if it might have been a pew taken from some primitive
church on its rebuilding.
There were, at intervals, along this walk, some bushes of lilacs,
bridal-wreath spirea, flowering almond, snowball, syringa, and scarlet
flowering quince; for roses, Mme. Plantier, the half double Boursault,
and some great clumps of the little cinnamon rose and Harrison's
yellow brier, whose flat opening flowers are things of a day, these two
varieties having the habit of travelling all over a garden by means of
their root suckers. Here and there were groups of tiger and lemon lilies
growing out of the ragged turf, bunches of scarlet bee balm, or Oswego
tea, as it is locally called, while plantain lilies, with deeply ribbed
heart-shaped leaves, catnip, southernwood, and mats of grass pinks.
Single hollyhocks of a few colours followed the fence line; tall phlox of
two colours, white and a dreary dull purple, rambled into the grass and
was scattered through the orchard, in company with New England
asters and various golden rods that had crept up from the waste
pasture-land below; and a straggling line of button chrysanthemums,
yellow, white, maroon, and a sort of medicinal rhubarb-pink, had
backed up against the woodhouse as if seeking shelter.
Lilies-of-the-valley planted in the shade and consequently anæmic and
scant of bells, blended with the blue periwinkle until their mingled
foliage made a great shield of deep, cool green that glistened against its
setting of faded, untrimmed grass.
This garden, such as it was, could be truly called hardy, insomuch as all
the care it had received for several years was an annual cutting of the
longest grass. The fittest had survived, and, among herbaceous things,
whatsoever came of seed, self-sown, had reverted nearly to the original
type, as in the case of hollyhocks, phlox, and a few common annuals.
The long grass, topped by the leaves that had drifted in and been left
undisturbed, made a better winter blanket than many people furnish to
their hardy plants,--the word hardy as applied to the infinite variety of
modern herbaceous plants as produced by selection and hybridization
not being perfectly understood.

While a