R.H.S., for its common
sense, well-arranged list of roses, and beautiful coloured plates, and
H.B. Ellwanger's little treatise on _The Rose_, a competent chronology
of the flower queen up to 1901, written concisely and from the American
standpoint. If I should send them now, you would be so bewildered by the
enumeration of varieties, many unsuited to this climate, intoxicated by
the descriptions of Rose-garden possibilities, and carried away by the
literary and horticultural enthusiasm of the one-time master of the
Deanery Garden, Rochester, that, like the child turned loose in the toy
shop, you would lose the power of choosing.
Lavinia Cortright lost nearly a year in beginning her rosary, owing to a
similar condition of mind, and Evan and I long ago decided that when we
read we cannot work, and _vice versa_, so when the Garden of Outdoors is
abed and asleep each year, we enter the Garden of Books with fresh
delight.
Have you a man with quick wit and a straight eye to be the spade hand
during the Garden Vacation? If not, make haste to find him, for, as you
have had Barney for five years, he is probably too set in his ways to
work at innovations cheerfully!
VIII
A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE
(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)
_June 21.
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