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When he had gone, I too slipped away, for the still white night outside called me. I went around to that favorite retreat of mine, the battered seat shut in among spireas and syringas. I like to say my rosary out of doors. The beads slipping through my fingers soothed me with their monotonous insistent petition.
It is difficult to imagine anything more daintily charming than the herbaceous Spireas. Alba, white, and rosea, soft pink, produce large, feathery tufts of bloom on stalks six and seven feet tall. The flowers of these varieties are exceedingly graceful in an airy, cloud-like way, and never fail to attract the attention of those who pass ordinary plants by without seeing them.
First the rhododendrons mixed with clumps of hollyhocks, next flowering almonds, roses, spireas and syringas; then came the drooping long leaf sugar pines, with an artistic mingling of slender limbed graceful silver birches: farther back were the taller firs and spruces, interspersed with thick clumps of small copper beeches, extending to and joining at the back of the cottage, the dense forest of tall, straight bodied elms, oaks and maples which partly hid and shaded the stables and the kitchen portion of the cottage.
"I am always hungry," I said. Mr. Vedder came out and linking his arm in mine and pointing out various spireas and Japanese barberries, of which he was very proud, we walked into the house together.
It hardly seems necessary to say anything about their beauty. That is one of the things that "goes without saying," among those who see, each spring, the glory of the Lilacs and the Spireas, and other shrubs which find a place in "everybody's garden." On very small ground the larger-growing shrubs take the place of trees quite satisfactorily.
The Spireas are excellent shrubs for grouping, especially when the white and pink varieties are used together. This shrub is very hardy, and of the easiest culture, and I can recommend it to the amateur, feeling confident that it will never fail to please. Quite as popular as the Spirea is the Deutzia, throughout the middle section of the northern states.
I stole away to a favorite haunt of mine at the back of the garden, behind the spireas and the holly tree, where there is a dilapidated old seat we have been threatening to remove any time this five years. Here, some time later, the Butterfly Man himself came stealthily, and seemed embarrassed to find the place preëmpted.
Bring into the garden some fresh flowering shrubs, wherever they may be wanted, and at the end of the month prune some of the hardier kind. NOVEMBER. Prepare a good heap of pasture ground, with the turf among it, to rot into mould for the borders. Transplant honeysuckles and spireas, with other hardy flowering shrubs.
If we were to plant a Lilac with its stiff and rather formal habit among a lot of Spireas, all slender grace and delicate foliage, the effect would be far from pleasing. The two shrubs have nothing in common, except beauty, and that is so dissimilar that it cannot be made to harmonize. There must be a general harmony. This does not mean that there may not be plenty of contrast.
It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after Christmas. The spireas were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It never rained.
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