f May by a belated
snowstorm. Winter with us is like a clumsy person who tries over and
over to make his exit from a room but does not know how to accomplish
it. It is a busy time, for no sooner are the annuals planted, and the
vegetables, than some of the seedlings from the hotbeds have to be set
out (such as early cosmos), and the perennial beds already have begun
to bloom, and require cultivation and admiration, and the flowers in
the wild garden--hepaticas and trilliums and bloodroot and
violets--are crying to be noticed, and, confound it all, here is the
lawn getting rank under the influence of its spring dressing, and
demands to be mowed! Yes, and we forget to get the mower sharpened
before we put it away in the fall.

"May fifteen"--it is my diary for last year--"apple blossoms showing
pink, and the rhubarb leaves peeping over the tops of their barrels
this morning, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves."

Well, well; straight, juicy red stalks the length of a barrel, fit for
a pie and the market! It is our second commercial product, the
asparagus slightly preceding it. The garden is getting into shape now,
indeed; the wheel-hoe is traveling up and down the green rows; the
hotbed glasses are entirely removed by day; and the early cauliflower
plants are put into the open ground at the first promise of a shower.
The annuals are up in the seed beds; the pool has been cleaned and
filled, the goldfish are once more swimming in it, the Cape Cod
water-lily, brought from its winter quarters in the dark cellar, has
begun to make a leaf, and we have begun to hope that maybe _this_ year
it will also make a blossom, for we are nothing in mid-May if not
optimistic.

The earlier Darwins are already in bloom. The German irises follow
rapidly. June comes, and we work amid the splendors of the Japanese
irises and the flame-line of Oriental poppies, setting the annuals
into their beds, from the tender, droopy schyzanthus plants to the
various asters and the now sturdy snapdragons. The color scheme had
been carefully planned last winter, and is as cheerfully disregarded
now, as some new inspiration strikes us, such as a border of purple
asters against salvia, with white dahlias behind--a strip of daring
fall color which would delight the soul of Gari Melcher, which
delighted me--and which my wife said was horrible.

So spring comes and goes in the garden, busy and beautiful, ceaseless
work and ceaseless wonder. But there is a mo