hat shall frame the different garden
vistas from the best vantage-point. Rustic pillars, after the plan of
Evan's that you sent me for the corners of the rose garden, will give
the necessary formal touch, while groups of shrubs can be so placed as
not only to screen colours that should not be seen in combination, but
to make reasons for turns that would otherwise seem arbitrary.

Aunt Lavinia has promised me any number of Chinese honeysuckle vines
from the little nursery bed of rooted cuttings that is Martin
Cortright's special province, for she writes me that they began with
this before having seed beds for either hardy plants or annuals, as they
wished to have hedges of flowering shrubs in lieu of fences, and some
fine old bushes on the place furnished ample cuttings of the
old-fashioned varieties, which they have supplemented.

Aunt Lavinia also says that the purple Wisteria grows easily from the
beanlike seed and blossoms in three years, and that she has a dozen of
these two-year-old seedlings that she will send me as soon as I have
place for them. Remembering your habit of giving every old tree a vine
to comfort its old age, and in particular the silver maple by the lane
gate of your garden, with its woodpecker hole and swinging garniture
of Wisteria bloom, I have promised a similar cloak to a gnarled bird
cherry that stands midway in the fence rockery, and yet another to an
attenuated poplar, so stripped of branches as to be little more than a
pole and still keeping a certain dignity.

[Illustration: A CURTAIN TO THE SIDE PORCH.]

The honeysuckles I shall keep for panelling the piazza, they are such
clean vines and easily controlled; while on the two-story portion under
the guest-room windows some Virginia creepers can be added to make a
curtain to the side porch.

As for other vines, we have many resources. Festooned across the front
stoop at Opal Farm is an old and gigantic vine of the scarlet-and-orange
trumpet creeper, that has overrun the shed, climbed the side of the
house, and followed round the rough edges of the eaves, while all
through the grass of the front yard are seedling plants of the vine
that, in spring, are blended with tufts of the white star of Bethlehem
and yellow daffies.

In the river woods, brush and swamp lots, near by, we have found and
marked for our own the mountain fringe with its feathery foliage and
white flowers shaded with purple pink, that suggest both the bleeding
heart of