Driving once along a country road, I saw on the edge of a field an expanse of yellow bloom which seemed to be an unfamiliar field-tint. It proved to be a vast bed of coreopsis, self-sown from year to year; and the blackened outlines of an old cellar wall in its midst showed that in that field once stood a home, once there a garden smiled. I am always sure when I see bouncing-bet, butter-and-eggs, and tawny lilies growing in a tangle together that in their midst may be found an untrodden door-stone, a fallen chimney, or a filled-in well. Still broader field expanses are filled with old-country plants. In June a golden glory of bud and blossom covers the hills and fields of Essex County in Massachusetts from Lynn to Danvers, and Ryal Side to Beverly; it is the English gorse or woad-wax, and by tradition it was first brought to this country in spray and seed as a packing for some of the household belongings of Governor Endicott. Thrown out in friendly soil, the seeds took root and there remain in the vicinity of their first American homes. It is a stubborn squatter, yielding only to scythe, plough, and hoe combined. Chicory or blue weed was, it is said, brought from England by Governor Bowdoin as food for his sheep. It has spread till its extended presence has been a startling surprise to all English visiting botanists. It hurts no one's fields, for it invades chiefly waste and neglected land--the "dear common flower"--and it has redeemed many a city suburb of vacant lots, many a railroad ash heap from the abomination of desolation. Whiteweed or ox-eye daisy, a far greater pest than gorse or chicory, has been carried intentionally to many a township by homesick settlers whose descendants to-day rue the sentiment of their ancestors. While the vallied garden of our old neighbors was sweet with blossoms, my mother's garden bore a still fresher fragrance--that of green growing things; of "posies," lemon-balm, rose geranium, mint, and sage. I always associate with it in spring the scent of the strawberry bush, or calycanthus, and in summer of the fraxinella, which, with its tall stem of larkspur-like flowers, its still more graceful seed-vessels and its shining ash-like leaves, grew there in rich profusion and gave forth from leaf, stem, blossom, and seed a pure, a memory-sweet perfume half like lavender, half like anise.