New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1874-05-14
NAY PLANNING.

This is the week in which mania for roots
and seeds, for planting, hOeing, and watering,
sweeps over the country. The great opera
tons Of Spring teamwork are already far adj
yanced on their way. Professional florists never
reach the end of their years work; but this Is
a dilettantG job, and has to do with back
yards or foot-wde borders or windOw-boxes.
Every individual woman reader of TIE
TRIBUNE, who has six square inches of moist
mold at her command, smells it, and eyes it
prophetically in these budding days, planning
an oak or a violet out of it. After the inevI-
table storm belonging to the first third OF
May is past, comes, according to Pennsylvania
proverb, "planting-day, the wOmens holt
day Tho tendcrest rose may now be safely
committed TO the care of its mother earth.
Now in town tho seed stores are thronged,
florists carts drive madly up and down; even
in New-YOrk there are enough chance open
ings among the bricks and sufficient zeal IN
window culture to mark the date. The Flower
Mission, we perceive, adds the gift of house
plants in some cases to that of bouquets, which
viii be of course much more useful and
kindly gift, provided that not little but much
care be shown in choosing such plants for the
all their boosted humility, are most fastdious
and int0lcrant as to their surroundings, and
grow suilenly i'll a palace il company with gas
or the dry furnace heat, whereas the arlsto-
cratic begonla will bloom and rejoice in gin
cellar, without drop of water for weeks, as
though it were especially sent by the Lord OF
beauty TO preach in waste places.
Outside of Ncw-York in towns and villages,
and along the edge OF the onion and beet beds
in farms, there is just now too vast an amount
of amateur gardening going on to pass with
out notice Women are planting flowers, very
much as men gamble in stocks-as a thing
good to work at in itself, and which needs no
apprenticeship. One would predict that zeal
and honest hard work were all that were
needed TO cover a patch of ground with
beauty of one sort or another. In the country
less will do. The farmers daughter pushes in
slip of prairie Queen" near the fence, or
back of the plg-pen, and in year the I'M
slightly place is charmed into a mass of superb
form and color. We all of us remember some
old-fashOned garden whose sweet peas and
gilli-nowers, INTENDED, carried perfume and
beauty into one generation after another But
let us, with the tenderest zeal, put money in
our purse and set out to revive the old treasures
in our town-yard. We are baffled at every
step; palsy follows our hoe; blight comes from
our watering-pot. The seeds send up pale
fibers as out of the region of disease. We
pore over gardeners catalogues of beauties,
brilliant crimson" "superb carmine." "sroyal
"white," and summon them about us. In a
fortnight they are but leahess sticks in bed
of baked clay. The plain English with regard
to town gardening is that wherever coal gases
or the exhalations of masses of people clog
the air, it requires the incest skill and largest
judgment to find any plants which are hardy
and sufficiently susceptible of humoring to
make successful fight against death. AS for
importing ferns into the murderous air of
drawing rooms, or heaping hideOus Jumps of
rock with wood-growths to dwindle and die,
it is delicate cruelty only possible to the
amiable Borgias who keep hooking birds In
cages and fishes in aquaria.