In the seed catalogue we mark all the things we are going to buy, we mark all the new things.  There is the wonderberry, sweeter than the blueberry, with the fragrance of the pineapple and the lusciousness of the strawberry!  We mark the Himalaya-berry—­which grows thirty feet, sometimes sixty feet in a single season.  Why, one catalogue told of a man who picked 3,833-1/2 pounds of berries from a single vine, beside what his children ate.  Our Himalaya vine grew four inches the first season and died the first winter.  We were glad it did.  We did not want such a monster running over our garden.  We wanted to raise other things.

But we did not lose faith in our catalogues.  We believe what they say just as the small boy believes he will see a lion eat a man at the circus, because the billboard pictures him doing it.

If we ordered all the seeds we mark in the catalogue in January, we would require a township for a garden, a Rockefeller to finance it and an army to hoe it.  We did not understand the purpose of a catalogue for a long time.  A catalogue is a stimulus.  It’s like an oyster cocktail before a dinner, a Scotch high-ball before the banquet and the singing before the sermon.  Salzer knows no one ever raised such a crop of cabbages as he pictures or the world would be drowned in sauer kraut.  If the Himalaya-berry bore as the catalogues say it does we should all be buried in jam.  You horticulturists never expect to raise such an apple as Lindsay describes; if you did, they would be more valuable than the golden apples of Hesperides.

But when we get a catalogue we just naturally dream that what we shall raise will not only be as good but will excel the pictures.  Alas, of such stuff are dreams made!  We could not do our gardening without catalogues, but they are not true to life as we find it in our garden.  We never got a catalogue that showed the striped bug on the cucumber, the slug on the rose bush, the louse on the aster, the cut worm on the phlox, the black bug on the syringa, the thousand and one pests, including the great American hen, the queen of the barnyard, but the Goth and vandal of the garden.

But the best part of summer in our garden is the work we do in winter.  Then it is that our garden is most beautiful, for we work in the garden of imagination, where drouth does not blight, nor storms devastate, where the worm never cuts nor the bugs destroy.  No dog ever uproots in the garden of imagination, nor doth the hen scratch.  This is the perfect garden.  Our golden glow blossoms in all of its auriferous splendor, the Oriental poppy is a barbaric blaze of glory, our roses are as fair as the tints of Aurora, the larkspur vies with the azure of heaven, the gladioli are like a galaxy of butterflies and our lilies like those which put Solomon in the shade.  Every flower is in its proper place to make harmony complete.  There is not a jarring note of color in our garden in the winter time.