"MARY P."

"She must join The Garden, You, and I," said Lavinia Cortright, almost
before I had finished the letter. "She will be entertainer in chief, for
she never fails to be amusing!"

"I thought there were to be but three members," I protested, thinking of
the possible complications of a three-cornered correspondence.

"Ah, well," Lavinia Cortright replied quickly, "make the Garden an
_Honorary_ member; it is usual so to rank people of importance from whom
much is expected, and then we shall still be but three--with privilege
of adding your husband as councillor and mine as librarian and custodian
of deeds!"

So I have promised to write to Mary Penrose this evening.

III

CONCERNING HARDY PLANTS

THE SEED BED FOR HARDY FLOWERS

When the Cortrights first came to Oaklands, expecting to remain here but
a few months each summer, their garden consisted of some borders of
old-fashioned, hardy flowers, back of the house. These bounded a
straight walk that, beginning at the porch, went through an arched grape
arbour, divided the vegetable garden, and finally ended under a tree in
the orchard at the barrier made by a high-backed green wooden seat, that
looked as if it might have been a pew taken from some primitive church
on its rebuilding.

There were, at intervals, along this walk, some bushes of lilacs,
bridal-wreath spirea, flowering almond, snowball, syringa, and scarlet
flowering quince; for roses, Mme. Plantier, the half double Boursault,
and some great clumps of the little cinnamon rose and Harrison's yellow
brier, whose flat opening flowers are things of a day, these two
varieties having the habit of travelling all over a garden by means of
their root suckers. Here and there were groups of tiger and lemon
lilies growing out of the ragged turf, bunches of scarlet bee balm, or
Oswego tea, as it is locally called, while plantain lilies, with deeply
ribbed heart-shaped leaves, catnip, southernwood, and mats of grass
pinks. Single hollyhocks of a few colours followed the fence line; tall
phlox of two colours, white and a dreary dull purple, rambled into the
grass and was scattered through the orchard, in company with New England
asters and various golden rods that had crept up from the waste
pasture-land below; and a straggling line of button chrysanthemums,
yellow, white, maroon, and a sort of medicinal rhubarb-pink, had backed
up against the woodhouse as if seeki