ay to
them proof against the seductions of those catalogues? Those asters!
Those larkspurs! Those foxgloves and poppies and Canterbury bells! All
that ravishing company, mine at the price of a few cents and a little
grubbing. Mine! There is the secret of it. Out in the great and
wonderful world beyond my garden, nature works her miracles constantly.
She lays her riches at my feet; they are mine for the gathering. But to
work these miracles myself,--to have my own little hoard that looks to
me for tending, for very life,--that is a joy by itself. My little
garden bed gives me something that all the luxuriance of woods and
fields can never give--not better, not so good, perhaps, but different.
Once having known the thrill of watching the first tiny shoot from a
seed that I have planted myself, once having followed it to leaf and
flower and seed again, I can never give it up.

My garden is not very big nor very beautiful. Perhaps the stretch of
rocks and grass and weeds beside the house--an expanse which not even
the wildest flight of the imagination could call a lawn--perhaps this
might be more pleasing if the garden were not there, but it is there,
and there it will stay. It means much grubbing. Just putting in seeds
and then weeding is, I find, no mere affair of rhetoric. Moreover, I am
introduced through my garden to an entirely new set of troubles:
beetles and cutworms and moles and hens and a host of marauding
creatures above ground and below, whose number and energy amaze me. And
each summer seems to add to their variety and resourcefulness. Clearly,
the pleasures of a garden are not commensurate with its pains. And yet--

But there is one kind of joy which it gives me at which even the
Scoffer--to wit, Jonathan--does not scoff. It began with Aunt Deborah's
phlox. Then came Christabel's larkspur. The next summer Mrs. Stone sent
me over some of her hardy little fall asters--"artemishy," she called
them. And Anne Stafford sent on some hollyhock seeds culled from
Emerson's garden. And Great-Aunt Sarah was dividing her peony roots, and
said I might take one. And Cousin Patty asked me if I wouldn't like some
of her mother's old-fashioned pinks. And so it goes.

And so it will go, I hope, to the end of the long day. Each year
my garden has in it more of my friends, and as I look at it I
can adopt poor Ophelia's pretty speech in a new meaning, and say,
"Larkspur--that's for remembrance; hollyhocks--that's for thoughts."