A feature of my garden is to be rock work and a little, thin stream of a brooklet flowing away from a wall fountain.  I read in my catalogues of marvellous Alpine plants, and I dreamed of irises by my brook.  I shall have some of both too.  Why not?  The war has got to end one of these days.  But meanwhile, why be too down-hearted?  On the cliffs above my pasture are masses of moss, holding, as a pincushion holds a breastpin, little early saxifrage plants.  From the crannies frail hair bells dangle forth.  There are clumps of purple cliffbrase and other tiny, exquisite ferns.  On a gravel bank beside the State road are thousands of viper’s bugloss plants; on a ledge nearby is an entire nursery of Sedum acre (the small yellow stone crop).  Columbines grow like a weed in my mowing, and so do Quaker ladies, which, in England, are highly esteemed in the rock garden.  The Greens Committee at the nearby golf club will certainly let me dig up some of the gay pinks which are a pest in one of the high, gravelly bunkers.  And these are only a fraction of the native material available for my rock work and bank.  Many of them are already in and thriving.

As for the little brook, any pond edge or brookside nearby has arrowheads, forget-me-nots, cardinal flowers, blue flag, clumps of beautiful grasses, monkey flowers, jewel-weed and the like.  There are cowslips, too, and blue vervain, and white violets.  If I want a clump of something tall, Joe-pye-weed is not to be disdained.  No, I do not anticipate any trouble about my brookside.  It will not look at all as I thought a year ago it was going to look.  It will not look like an illustration in some “garden beautiful” magazine.  It will look like—­like a brook!  I am tremendously excited now at the prospect of seeing it look like a brook, a little, lazy, trickling Yankee brook.  If I ever let it look like anything else, I believe I shall deserve to have my spring dry up.

Probably I shall have moments of, for me, comparative affluence in the years to come, when I shall once more listen to the siren song of catalogues, and order Japanese irises, Darwin tulips, hybrid lilacs, and so on.  But by that time, I feel sure, my native plants and shrubs will have got such a start, and made such a luxuriant, natural tangle, that they will assimilate the aliens and teach them their proper place in a New England garden.  At any rate, till the war is over, I am 100 per cent Berkshire County!

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WANTED:  A HOME ASSISTANT

(Pictorial Review)

One illustration made by a staff artist, with the caption, “The New Home Assistant is Trained for Her Work.”

WANTED:  A HOME ASSISTANT

BUSINESS HOURS AND WAGES ARE HELPING WOMEN TO SOLVE THE SERVANT PROBLEM

BY LOUISE F. NELLIS