Nature reflects the color of the spirit. Beauty is not confined to a season nor to region. The gardens of Georgia or Florida are perpetually in bloom, but are they more beautiful than northern gardens in winter, where imagination sorts the beautiful tracery of tree branches into designs that few artists have approached in their delineation of nature? Are the Alps grander than the Rockies? Who can judge?
Reading about gardens is the next best thing to working in them. Tulips now bloom in the Holland of our books; the perennial borders are what we hoped they would be all summer; the gardens of the seed catalogs anticipate all sorts of new flowers that are larger, more fragrant, and with colors of superior brilliance. Let us work to make our winter visions come true next year, reading, seeing and planning.
WATERING plants in winter is a rather exacting operation. Those growing actively should have the most water, whereas those which are resting can get along with very little.
Humidity. Plants like a high relative humidity, and there are many ways to attain it. The home gardener who aspires to good house plants should have some sort of humidifier installed.
Glazed Pots. Massachusetts State College, has found that the ordinary clay flower pot absorbs a great share of the moisture which we give to our plants, so that the soil in the pot is quite dry at the bottom, the very place where the feeding roots should be located.
He tells us that the old notion that the plants get air through the pores of the pot is erroneous. His experiments show that plants grow much better when grown in glazed pots, pots that are given a thick coating of paint, or paper pots that have been treated with some substance. The usual paper pot decays readily
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