tter, but practically certain--and that
is a tremendously important point about all gardening operations.

While the cold frame and hotbed offer great advantages--especially in
the way of room--over growing plants and starting seed in the house,
they are nevertheless incomparably less useful than the simplest small
greenhouse. Plants may be wintered over in them, violets may be grown in
them, lettuce may be grown late in the fall and early in the spring, and
followed by cucumbers. But they are not convenient to work in. One is
dependent on the weather. They are not satisfactorily under control.
Take, for instance, one of those dark fall days, with a cold nasty
drizzle cutting down on a slant, or one of those bright sunny and cloudy
chill-winded spring days, when no pleasure is to be had out-of-doors.
Under the shelter of your little glass roof, where you can make your own
weather, what fun it is to be potting up a batch of cuttings, or putting
in a few packets of choice seed for the extra early garden! There is
nothing like it.

CHAPTER XXI

THE CONSTRUCTION OF CONSERVATORIES AND SMALL GREENHOUSES

Have you ever stepped from the chill and dreariness of a windy day, when
it seems as if the very life of all things growing were shrunk to
absolute desolation, into the welcome warmth and light and fragrance,
the beauty and joy of a glass house full of green and blossoming plants?
No matter how small it was, even though you had to stoop to enter the
door, and mind your elbows as you went along, what a good, glad
comfortable feeling flooded in to you with the captive sunlight! What a
world of difference was made by that sheet of glass between you and the
outer bitterness and blankness. Doubtless such an experience has been
yours. Doubtless, too, you wished vaguely that you could have some such
little corner to escape to, a stronghold to fly to when old winter lays
waste the countryside. But April came with birds, and May with flowers,
and months before the first dark, shivery days of the following autumn,
you had forgotten that another winter would come on, with weeks of
cheerless, uncomfortable weather. Or possibly you did not forget, until
you had investigated the matter of greenhouse building and found that
even a very small house, built to order, was far beyond your means.

Do not misunderstand me as disparaging the construction companies: they
do excellent work--and get excellent prices. You may not be able to