hey are to
bloom, and all the further care they need will be judicious watering and
the careful staking of the flower stalks if they are weak and the buds
top-heavy,--and by the way, as to the staking of flowers in general, a
word with you later on.

In the greenhouse, pinks are liable to many ailments, and several of
these follow them out-of-doors, three having given me some trouble, the
most fatal being of a fungoid order, due usually to unhealthy root
conditions or an excess of moisture.

_Rust_ is one of these, its Latin name being too long for the simple
vocabulary of The Garden, You, and I. It first shows itself in a brown
spot that seems to have worked out from the inner part of the leaf.
Sometimes it can be conquered by snipping the infected leaves, but if it
seizes an entire bed, the necessary evil of spraying with Bordeaux
mixture must be resorted to, as in the case of fungus-spotted
hollyhocks.

_Thrip_, the little transparent, whitish fly, will sometimes bother
border carnations in the same way as it does roses. If the flowers are
only in bud, I sprinkle them with my brass rose-atomizer and powder
slightly with helebore. But if the flowers are open, sprinkling and
shaking alone may be resorted to. For the several kinds of underground
worms that trouble pinks, of which the wireworm is the chief, I have
found a liberal use of unslaked lime and bone-dust in the preparation of
the soil before planting the best preventive.

Other ailments have appeared only occasionally. Sometimes an apparently
healthy, full-grown plant will suddenly wither away, or else swell up
close to the ground and finally burst so that the sap leaks out and it
dies like a punctured or girdled tree. The first trouble may come from
the too close contact of fresh manure, which should be kept away from
the main roots of carnations, as from contact with lily bulbs.

As to the swelling called _gout_, there is no cure, so do not temporize.
Pull up the plant at once and disinfect the spot with unslaked lime and
sulphur.

Thus, Mary Penrose, may you have either pinks in your garden or a garden
of pinks, whichever way you may care to develop your idea. "A deal of
trouble?" Y-e-s; but then only think of the flowers that crown the work,
and you might spend an equal amount of time in pricking cloth with a
steel splinter and embroidering something, in the often taken-in-vain
name of decorative art, that in the end is only an elaborated
rag--witho