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When decorating for Christmas consider using baskets suspended from the door knocker or hung beneath the letter box. If the entrance is broad, the fireside wood basket may be filled with greens and placed at one side. Old-fashioned sleigh bells hung on a spray of pine or spruce are charming. Bronze jingle bells are now obtainable. Lacking sleigh bells, others do well.

Why not go out into the nearby countryside and examine, some of nature’s samples, choosing those which best fit the setting provided by the home ground. There is a haunting charm to a hillside home rising out of natural unscarred surroundings. You will never regret following the tips you get from nature, for she has been rock gardening since the beginning of time.

Nature always does more than her share if given a hand instead of a fist… I had a young Chinese arbor vitae with thin top which I thought might be made better, so cut top off down to a sturdy branch so as to give it a chance to grow into another top. That was two years ago and today the new top is thicker and the tree is becoming better in every way.

On a Sunday in July about 2:30 I started for a walk to Trevorton Mountains for some huckleberries. This mountain is loaded with the early blue, the high blue, and a black huckleberry.

Where frost is not severe Portulacaria afra, with reddish stems and small glossy leaves, provides a neat little bush, especially when pruned. Kalanchoes add interesting foliage and flowers and an assortment of mesembryanthemums will give radiance over many months. Greenovia auria’s rosettes, closed during the hottest, driest months, are spread to receive the welcome rain. In early spring come the sprays of flat, circular bloom which remind one of yellow starfish.

The inveterate seed-sower, to whom the planting of seed is a year muml job rather than a Springtime operation, is sometimes hard put to find enough containers of the right size and substance for a variety of seeds, especially the rather small quantities generally put up in packets of the rarer perennials. The requirements are few but important. The container must have proper drainage, it must not he so large that the soil will become waterlogged, nor yet so small that the seedlings are crowded and have to be thinned out.

Bristol Fairy – Baby’s breath, may be grafted on it’s own roots with good success. It is the much desired type that is best propagated by grafting but many do not know it’s own roots may be used for this purpose.

The Minnesota mums, though developed primarily for northern regions, have been grown successfully in Ohio, at least as far south as Kentucky, and in the east in Maine and Massachusetts.

Many shrubs and vines provide spectacular displays of flowers that make a special appeal to beginning gardeners.

They said when I came to Hillcrest Acres (it was mudcrest then) that I would never have a flower garden on the heavy, sticky, joint clay. I was almost ready to believe it myself for the first year. It was too dry or too wet to work all the time. I had few vegetables and flowers that first year and was beginning to think that maybe I had bought a white elephant.