on the other side of the fence, these owners are only too glad to have a few of the massed, invading plants or bushes thinned out.  But far more often there is not even a fence, or if there is, it has heavy woods or a swamp or a wild pasture beyond it.  I could go after plants every day for six months and nobody would ever detect where I took them.  My only rule—­self-imposed—­is never to take a single specimen, or even one of a small group, and always to take where thinning is useful, and where the land or the roadside is wild and neglected, and no human being can possibly be injured.  Most often, indeed, I simply go up the mountain along, or into, my own woods.

I am not going to attempt any botanical or cultural description of what I am now attempting.  That will have to wait, anyhow, till I know a little more about it myself!  But I want to indicate, in a general way, some of the effects which are perfectly possible, I believe, here in a Massachusetts garden, without importing a single plant, or even sowing a seed or purchasing any stock from a nursery.

Take the matter of asters, for instance.  Hitherto my garden, up here in the mountains where the frosts come early and we cannot have anemone, japonica, or chrysanthemums, has generally been a melancholy spectacle after the middle of September.  Yet it is just at this time that our roadsides and woodland borders are the most beautiful.  The answer isn’t alone asters, but very largely.  And nothing, I have discovered, is much easier to transplant than a New England aster, the showiest of the family.  Within the confines of my own farm or its bordering woods are at least seven varieties of asters, and there are more within half a mile.  They range in color from the deepest purple and lilac, through shades of blue, to white, and vary in height from the six feet my New Englands have attained in rich garden soil, to one foot.  Moreover, by a little care, they can be so massed and alternated in a long border (such a border I have), as to pass in under heavy shade and out again into full sun, from a damp place to a dry place, and yet all be blooming at their best.  With what other flower can you do that?  And what other flower, at whatever price per dozen, will give you such abundance of beauty without a fear of frosts?  I recently dug up a load of asters in bud, on a rainy day, and already they are in full bloom in their new garden places, without so much as a wilted leaf.

Adjoining my farm is an abandoned marble quarry.  In that quarry, or, rather, in the rank grass bordering it, grow thousands of Solidago rigida, the big, flat-topped goldenrod.  This is the only station for it in Berkshire County.  As the ledges from this quarry come over into my pastures, and doubtless the goldenrod would have come too, had it not been for the sheep, what could be more fitting than for me to make this glorious yellow flower a part of my garden scheme?  Surely if anything belongs in my peculiar soil and landscape it does.  It transplants easily, and under cultivation reaches a large size and holds its bloom a long time.  Massed with the asters it is superb, and I get it by going through the bars with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.