But how pleasantly at home a girl in her garden garb appears, whether on the rungs of a ladder tying up the roses, or doing some thinning out on a too rampant border! There should be no work in a garden beyond her powers--that is, of course, in a one-gardener garden--a one-greenhouse garden. She has no business trying to carry a tub with a shrub weighing one hundred and fifty pounds from one place to another; but she can wheel a brewer's or a coalman's sack barrow with two nine-inch wheels with two hundredweight resting on it for half a mile without feeling weary. No garden should be without such a vehicle. One that I bought ten years ago from a general dealer has enabled me to superannuate the cumbersome wheelbarrow. You require to lift the tub into the wheelbarrow, but the other does the lifting when you push the iron guard four inches under the staves at the bottom. As for that supposed bugbear--the carting of manure, it should not exist in a modern garden. A five-shilling tin of fertiliser and a few sacks of Wakeley's hop mixture will be enough for the borders of a garden of an acre, unless you aim at growing everything to an abnormal size. But you must know what sort of fertilising every bed requires. I mention these facts because we read constantly of the carting of manure being beyond the limits of a girl-gardener's strength, to say nothing of the distasteful character of the job. The time is coming when there will be none of the old-fashioned stable-sweepings either for the garden or the field, and I think we shall get on very well without it, unless we wish to grow mushrooms. The only other really horrid job that I would not have my girl face is pot-washing. This is usually a winter job, because, we are told, summer is too busy a time in the garden to allow of its being done except when the ice has to be broken in the cistern and no other work is possible. But why should the pots be washed out of doors and in cold vater? If you have a girl-gardener, why should you not give her the freedom of the scullery sink where the hot water is laid on? There is no hardship in washing a couple of hundred pots in hot water and _in_ a warm scullery on the most inclement day in January. The truth is that there exists a garden tradition, and it originated with men who had neither imagination nor brains, and people would have us believe that it must be maintained--that frogs and toads should be slain and that gardener is a proper noun of the masculine gender--that manure must be filthy and that a garden should never look otherwise than unfinished at any time of the year--that radiation is the same as frost, and that watering should be done regularly and without reference to the needs of the individual plants.