eed or ox-eye daisy, a far greater pest than gorse or chicory, has
been carried intentionally to many a township by homesick settlers whose
descendants to-day rue the sentiment of their ancestors.

While the vallied garden of our old neighbors was sweet with blossoms,
my mother's garden bore a still fresher fragrance--that of green growing
things; of "posies," lemon-balm, rose geranium, mint, and sage. I always
associate with it in spring the scent of the strawberry bush, or
calycanthus, and in summer of the fraxinella, which, with its tall stem
of larkspur-like flowers, its still more graceful seed-vessels and its
shining ash-like leaves, grew there in rich profusion and gave forth
from leaf, stem, blossom, and seed a pure, a memory-sweet perfume half
like lavender, half like anise.

Truly, much of our tenderest love of flowers comes from association, and
many are lovingly recalled solely by their odors. Balmier breath than
was ever borne by blossom is to me the pure pungent perfume of ambrosia,
rightly named, as fit for the gods. Not the miserable weed ambrosia of
the botany, but a lowly herb that grew throughout the entire summer
everywhere in "our garden"; sowing its seeds broadcast from year to
year; springing up unchecked in every unoccupied corner, and under every
shrub and bushy plant; giving out from serrated leaf and irregular
raceme of tiny pale-green flowers, a spicy aromatic fragrance if we
brushed past it, or pulled a weed from amongst it as we strolled down
the garden walk. And it is our very own--I have never seen it elsewhere
than at my old home, and in the gardens of neighbors to whom its seeds
were given by the gentle hand that planted "our garden" and made it a
delight. Goethe says, "Some flowers are lovely to the eye, but others
are lovely to the heart." Ambrosia is lovely to my heart, for it was my
mother's favorite.

And as each "spring comes slowly up the way," I say in the words of
Solomon, "Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my
garden, that the spices thereof may flow out"--that the balm and mint,
the thyme and southernwood, the sweetbrier and ambrosia, may spring
afresh and shed their tender incense to the memory of my mother, who
planted them and loved their pure fragrance, and at whose presence, as
at that of Eve, flowers ever sprung--

"And touched by her fair tendance gladlier grew."

Index

Abington, church vote in, 286.

Acrelius, Dr., quoted, 146.