erect, yet it requires no staking and it is easily controlled by
pinching or pinning to the soil with stout hair-pins.

One little fragrant flower, fraught with meaning and remembrance,
belongs to the annuals, though its family is much better known among the
half-hardy perennials that require winter protection here. This is the
gold and brown annual wall-flower, slender sister of _die gelbe violet_,
and having that same subtle violet odour in perfect degree. It cannot be
called a decorative plant, but it should have plenty of room given it in
the bed of sweet odours and be used as a border on the sunny side of
wall or fence, where, protected from the wind and absorbing every ray of
autumn sunlight, it will often give you at least a buttonhole bouquet
on Christmas morning.

[Illustration: THE SUMMER GARDEN--VERBENAS.]

The cosmos is counted by catalogues and culturists one of the most
worthy of the newer annuals, and so it is when it takes heed to its ways
and behaves its best, but otherwise it has all the terrible uncertainty
of action common to human and garden parvenues. From the very beginning
of its career it is a conspicuous person, demanding room and abundance
of food. Thinking that its failure to bloom until frost threatened was
because I had sown the seed out of doors in May, I gave it a front room
in my very best hotbed early in March, where, long before the other
occupants of the place were big enough to be transplanted, Mrs. Cosmos
and family pushed their heads against the sash and insisted upon seeing
the world. Once in the garden, they throve mightily, and early in July,
at a time when I had more flowers than I needed, the entire row
threatened to bloom. After two weeks of coquettish showing of colour
here and there, up and down the line, they concluded that midsummer sun
did not agree with any of the shades of pink, carmine, or crimson of
which their clothes were fashioned, and as for white, the memory of
recent acres of field daisies made it too common, so they changed their
minds and proceeded to grow steadily for two months. When they were
pinched in on top, they simply expanded sidewise; ordinary and
inconspicuous staking failed to restrain them, and they even pulled away
at different angles from poles of silver birch with stout rope between,
like a festive company of bacchantes eluding the embraces of the police.
A heavy wind storm in late September snapped and twisted their hollow
trunks and bran