Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-04-01
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

| to his ability, to learn bit Of Natures
ruthless outlook.
| 1t is well for him If he keep his hui
MANNING efforts away from plants
Let him not endow them with human
| ity, as he does his dogs and cats and
horses, and perhaps even his cows and
| hens.
| Let him see plants as merely so much
bark, sap, vegetable substance, curl
ously wrought chemical factories, going
through certain reactions at the touch
of sun and rain.
So he will be saved sorrow over them,
when certain favorites fail to come up
Not that there will not be regrets.
There will be. It is. inevitable. Take
these two fine rosebushss. these favor
| ties of seven years, which have given
him hundreds of blooms.
A series Of moves and tranSplantings
was too much for them. Their service
in this world is at an end Other bushes
will bloom, but these no more.
The gardener digs them up, and finds
their roots withered away. Nothing
| further can be done with them. Yes
he has regrets, but scarcely sorrow.
Even If he is of a sentimental nature,
given to endowing inanimate things
with a sort of personality of their own,
over these happenings.
4 x
These are the innocent deaths Of the
garden. in which there is little Of Sor-
row or failure. The cruelty which
hangs like an evil fate over all other
death is happily absent here.
So many plants each season will be
doomed. It cannot be helped, and the
experienced gardener expects 1t, and
even looks forward to it.
He will not be in the least put out
by. the happening, but will order more
plants, that is all, or be content to let
the lack exist.
This is a sort of natural pruning or
cutting out of dead wood. which Nature
does in the garden, and no one can say
that she does not do well with her own
children.
She knows, better than any, how
long each plant shall exist, and how
long it will survive When it begins to
show signs of failure she is the last one
to coddle 1t.
The gardener may keep it alive with
water, but Nature, being in the mood
of a drought, does nothing for it; on
the contrary, she does the one thing
which will hasten its end-she sends no
water at all.
In such a case many a plant will
show amazing powers toward plant
righteousness. which has its beginning
and ending in staying alive. The flower
and fruit occupy a midpoSition.
Often a plant will have weathered
the drought in fashion which draws
only admiration from the gardener who
bends over It,
In the desert many plant Is equipped
to stand such abstinence, and can live
by withdrawing into itself, as it were,
reducing its flow of vital sap to mere
thread, the remainder acting as insu-
lation.
other plants harbor their essential
moisture in curious drops on the sur
face. and dole them out to the entire
structure Of the plant as needed.
It may be that these devices are
handed down, in part, to all plants. and
that each one Of them, in time of
drought, goes through the motions of
constructing them.
Whether they do or not. whether
they live or die, they are part Of
amazing. tickle Nature, and are no less
interesting to the gardener, when he
digs them up and throws them aside,
than when they live and thrive.