MULCH
Toward spring the books on gardening begin to come into the library, and I look them over with fresh enthusiasm. Mrs. Bunkum is no longer my favorite author in this field, but her sister writers are very dear to my heart.
There is Mrs. Reginald Creasus. I seize her latest volume with the eagerness of a child. I like to see the pictures of the new marble bench which she has imported from Pompeii and set up at the end of the Rose Walk. Then she usually has a new sculptured group—a fountain, or some other little trifle by Rodin or St. Gaudens, which looks so well amidst the Japanese iris.
After gazing at these illustrations for a while, I go home and observe the red woodshed, and I declare it looks altogether different. It is wonderful how discontented with your lot you can get by reading Mrs. Creasus's books on gardening. Sometimes I think that I am making a mistake in voting the Republican ticket, year after year. Mr. Debs may be right, after all.
This year Mrs. Creasus calls her volume "The Simple Garden." From it I gathered that anyone who knows anything at all will not pass the summer without an Abyssinian hibiscus unfolding its lovely blooms somewhere on the place. They are absolutely necessary, in fact. You have to be careful with them—when you plant them, that is. The fertilizer which they require has to be fetched from the island of Ascension. I calculated that by going without food or clothes for two years I could just about buy and support one of them.
I wish Mrs. Creasus would write a book about the complicated garden. I should like to see it.
Just as I had bought a garden hose, along came Mrs. Creasus's book, remarking casually that it is well to have the whole garden laid out with underground water-pipes, placed at least six feet below the surface, to avoid frost. Two or three private reservoirs are, of course, an essential. I wonder what Mrs. Creasus keeps in these reservoirs. I suppose it is champagne, but I wouldn't like to ask.
Scotch gardeners are going out, she says. The Chinese are the only kind, although they demand—and get—forty to fifty dollars more per month than the others. I made a note to employ no more Scotchmen, and then I looked to see what she had to say about sweet-peas.
She was ever so enthusiastic about them. No family should be without sweet-peas, she said. You dig a trench, and you put in four or five different kinds of dressing, separated by layers of earth, and then you plant the peas, and as fast as they come up you keep discouraging them by putting more earth and things on top, and then you build a trellis for them to run on, sinking the posts not less than four feet, and there you are.