poles--the
scarlet runners. The adlumia, or mountain fringe, was a special vine of
our own and known by a special name--virgin's bower. With its delicate
leaves, almost as beautiful as a maidenhair fern, and its dainty pink
flower, it festooned the ripening corn as wantonly and luxuriantly as it
encircled the snowball and lilac bushes.

Though "colored herbs" were cultivated in England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as carefully as were flowers,--striped hollies,
variegated myrtles, and bays being the gardener's pride,--yet in our old
American gardens few plants were grown for their variegated or
odd-colored foliage. The familiar and ever-present ribbon-grass, also
called striped grass, canary grass, and gardener's garters,--whose
pretty expanded panicles formed an almost tropical effect at the base of
the garden hedge; the variegated wandering jew, the striped leaves of
some varieties of day-lilies; the dusty-miller, with its "frosty pow"
(which was properly a house plant), fill the short list. The box was the
sole evergreen.

And may I not enter here a plea for the preservation of the box-edgings
of our old garden borders? I know they are almost obsolete--have been
winter-killed and sunburned--and are even in sorry disrepute as having a
graveyard association, and as being harborers of unpleasant and
unwelcome garden visitors. One lover of old ways thus indignantly
mourns their passing:--

"I spoke of box-edgings. We used to see them in little country
gardens, with paths of crude earth. Nowadays, it has been
discovered that box harbours slugs, and we are beginning to have
beds with tiled borders, while the walks are of asphalt. For a
pleasure-ground in Dante's _Inferno_ such materials might be
suitable."

For its beauty in winter alone, the box should still find a place in our
gardens. It grows to great size. Bushes of box in the deserted garden at
Vaucluse in Newport, Rhode Island, are fifteen feet in height, and over
them spread the branches of forest trees that have sprung up in the
garden beds since that neglected pleasaunce was planted, over a century
ago. The beautiful border and hedges of box at Mount Vernon, the home of
Washington, plead for fresh popularity for this old-time favorite.

Our mothers and grandmothers came honestly by their love of gardens.
They inherited this affection from their Puritan, Quaker, or Dutch
forbears, perhaps from the days when the fa