h the old forget-me-nots
will live through, it pays to pull out the most ragged of them and trust
to the youngsters to fill their places. These, and English daisies, I let
grow together about as they will. They are pretty together, with their
mingling of pink, white, and blue, they never run out, and all I need is
to keep them from spreading too far, or from crowding each other too much.

When my back aches from this kind of sorting and shifting, I straighten up
and look about me again. Ah! The phlox! Time now to attend to that!

My white phlox is really the most distinguished thing in my garden. I have
pink and lavender, too, but any one can have pink and lavender by ordering
them from a florist. They can have white, too, but not my white. For mine
never saw a florist; it is an inheritance.

Sixty or seventy years ago there was a beautiful little garden north of
the old house tended and loved by a beautiful lady. The lady died, and the
garden did not long outlive her. Its place was taken by a crab-apple
orchard, which flourished, bore blossom and fruit, until in its turn it
grew old, while the garden had faded to a dim tradition. But one day in
August, a few years ago, I discovered under the shade of an old crab tree,
two slender sprays of white phlox, trying to blossom. In memory of that
old garden and its lady, I took them up and cherished them. And the
miracle of life was again made manifest. For from those two little
half-starved roots has come the most splendid part of my garden. All
summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden's edge, beside the
flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving
background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is
greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to
bloom arrives--a long month, from early August to mid-September--it is a
glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the
shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and
they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness.

Here and there I have let the pink and lavender phlox come in, for they
begin to bloom two weeks earlier, when the garden needs color. But always
my white must dominate. And it does. Most wonderful of all is it on
moonlight nights of late August, when it broods over the garden like a
white cloud, and the night moths come crowding to its fragrant feast, with
their intermittent