Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1891-05-24

m R mulus, the lemon
Ih WML verbenas which make
ILL., A#-9 x the very earth at their
Ei roots fragrant, and the
dark rosemary, whose
leaves are scented
with remembrance.
Everything calls to outdoor life, and yet
| it is pleasant to turn from the May cold
when the east wind comes up and read such
pleasant letters as unknown women write.
One which has interested me more than
any comes from a city teacher who desires to
change her vocation for healthier work in
the open air. She is anxious to learn gar
dening to support herself, but laments that
she has never been able to find any family
in the country that would receive and teach
her how to raise flowers and fruit. The let
ter is lost, but its gist is we'll remembered.
The Case Is Rather Rare.
1t is not quite the only application of the
kind ever received, but the women who wish
to learn gardening are usually driven into
it by circumstances, and it is rare that one
is sensible enough to take it up of her own
accord. Here and there widow left with
an orchard and garden ready made to her
but most of the successes which read so
charmingly in domestic stories are evolved
solely from the writer's inner consciousness.
Gardening is hardly easy or light work
for anybody. 1t is not solely picturesque
training of vines or gathering painted fruit.
1t means getting up at or O. mornings,
to pick green worms off the salad plants or
burn the webb off of apple trees, going over
lots from end to end with daisy cutter,
clipping the dandelions before they run to
seed and sow destruction for acres It
means getting up in the middle of the night
to see that the sash is not blown off the hot
beds and keeping up fires cold nights when
the mercury dips below freezing about mid
night 1t means ten to twelve hours good
work each day in the growing season and
steady care and forethought the rest of the
year. 1t will not do for the gardener to
mind sun or shower, damp or chill
Some Small and Sour Jealousy.
AS for the encouragement a woman finds
in the occupation because she is a woman,
that is gone by. The small market garden
ers and greenhouse men do not welcome
competitors of either sex. Some of the
sourest, smallest jealousies ever met are
found among small florists.
A woman's garden is always the last to
get plowed, because men think it isn't
worth while to consider her. Laborers who
work by the day or month will do little
enough for men employers, but when it
comes to working for a woman I know I
could do as much myself any day when well
as the lazy Jakes pretend to do for me,
though they are always ready to charge the
highest wages for the favor of working for
a woman at all All the encouragement
get from a farmer editor of experience is
that woman can't do anything with gar
den. She can't, weighted with the shiftless,
Indifferent, usual sort of workers, with i'll
health herself, and interference and upset.
ting of all her plans, where she should ex-
pect help, which is the experience of most
women stepping into open fields of labor.
Neither ones neighbors nor ones friends
are apt to prove encouraging to new ven
lures.
Living Poetry in Gardening.
What then? Give up? Never, nor yet
set your teeth nor clinch your hands, as
demonstratiye little women do, and end
there. But quietly in the depths. of your
mind clinch resolution to succeed or die in
making it unpleasant for whoever gets in
the way of your success. Gardening is too
sweet, brave and life-giving pursuit not to
be taken by women. Only the best sort of
womanhood has the will and enthusiasm to
rewards. What is it to work from in the
morning to at night in planting time when
one feels 1.-THE as hickory bow and drops to
dreamless sleep to wake in the flush of dawn
as if new created?
All day long living poetry is about one.
To live and work among towering boughs
or fruited ones, fed by fragrance of vine and
aromatics, with Virgil, Theocritus and Ten
nyson running in ones head while one
plants, prunes and dibbles, every day to be
greeted by some new, lovely fruit or bios
som, is life worth living. You can work
either as clowns do, reluctantly, or as poets
do, for love of labor. Very soon the work
will'captivate you and you cannot let it 60.
I have worked in spring rain all the fore
noon, setting out raspberries and sweetbrier
from the woods, without catching sneeze
of cold, and wrought from dawn till dark
over plants for sheer delight in the labor,
with far less fatigue than six hours desk
work costs. Any woman who has to earn
her bread cannot do so in a sweeter way
than gardening, and everyone who is not
afraid of work, and is willing to learn it,
ought to be encouraged by every means.
Not the Task of Day.
The only way to learn quickly and COM
pletely is to enter some gardening family
and give ones time for year or two for the
sake of learning. 1t is not craft that can
be picked up as one goes A novice, to
whom the names of most plants are strangers,
will be very well paid by receiving board,
instruction and practice for the first two
years.
English women of the better class are
much less afraid of real work in gardens
than our finical American ladies. Even O
village woman here feels it beneath her
dignity to dig flower border with fork
or spade If she does not fancy it ungenteel
she has been taught that it is injurious
to her health. / have questioned physicians
about this and the reply has invariably been
that if q woman wants to strengthen her.
self SO as to be free from the ordinary all
ments of her sex she can do nothing better
than to use spade, fork and wheelbarrow
to real effect Beginning with what her
strength will bear she will find strength
and suppleness and increase surprisingly
and delightfully."- working in the open air
and using tools which call out exertion.
Gardening is vastly better for physical de- |
velopment than indoor gymnastics, because
it calls muscles into such varied play.
Why Farmers Get So Crooked.
Old farmers grow stif:jointed and bent,
not by work, but by the utter neglect of
hygiene, which prevails in rural districts.
The high riding boot with thin cork sole is
the proper shoe for the gardener, and loose
flannel trousers held by elastic around the
waist and falling below the knee protect
from chilliness and from insects.
There is no particular need of woman
dressing like scarcerow to rake her flower
borders, but it is far less appropriate for
her to 90 to work in the trim ruff1es and
fancy hat which she would wear for stroll |