GARDEN by day discloses only a portion of its beauties, and many people living near gardens are oblivious of the charms of their most familiar surroundings. Plants, like city people, sleep and wake at all hours. Those which revive at sunrise are inclined to sleep during the darkness. A sleeping garden is no romantic fancy of the poet. Any garden of plainest prose, where mosquitoes bite and weeds flourish, can give us strange and unfamiliar sights, but of this world, not of fairyland. Leaves sleep in positions very different from those assumed during their waking hours. The familiar clover brings its two side-leaflets together like the closed covers of a book, and the center one bends forward until it touches the others. Being natives of well-watered countries, they may do this to escape being beaten prostrate by rain. Those that like water, as do the geraniums, seem to twist themselves into cup-like forms to catch the dew. The drooping leaves of the grape vine are raised at the edges and depressed in the middle, and each little stem often leads a tiny streamlet on its way to the main trunk. Why is it that some leaves want to catch the water and others shed it as rapidly as possible ? Wistaria leaves droop as if in slumber. The common locust settles down early.

The terminal leaflet hangs like a plummet, while the side leaflets dangle in rows. Some leaves hang as if drooping from excessive heat, but they do not feel as wilted leaves, soft and limp, but are crisp and firm. All sleeping foliage seems characterized by this curious stiffness.

The sleeping and waking of plants are governed by many causes aside from the flight of time. The brightness of the sky, the amount of dew-fall, or the state of the atmosphere all appear to exercise an effect on this beautiful and still mysterious phase of nature. Darkness does not cause it, for the portulacca closes its brilliant flowers while daylight lasts, and the sweet old mirabilis or four o'clock discloses its beauty and awakes to a more intense life before the sun has lost his power; then if his rays are fervent on the succeeding day the flowers wilt soon after they are felt, but on a cloudy day will often remain to greet the new blossoms.

The day-lilies open at evening like the honeysuckles, and give their first and most delicious perfume to the night air. Although the ipomaeas include the "morning glory," there are numerous kinds that, like the moon-flower, are finest at night. Are we so fortunate as to have a lily pond, then we should raise the tropical nym-phasa, which is one of the most beautiful of all flowers. Fitting companions to the lilies are the different forms of the night-blooming cereus. But it is not only to tropical strangers like these that we need look for beauty - at dark the Oenotheras or evening primroses are in bloom. They come in nightly succession for weeks, and in dull weather endure through the succeeding day unless their frail texture is destroyed by rain. Their great yellow petals open and disclose a cross-shaped stigma and trembling anthers; and the flowers are made still more attractive by the faint, rich perfume which they exhale. The white-flowered night-blooming tobacco (Nicotiana ajfinis) should be more often grown than it is, and will be when it is better known. The datura is another beautiful night-blooming flower.

It seems as if most trumpet shaped flowers first open at night, and that the night bloomers are most abundant during the fervid heat of summer ; while the flowers of spring open in response to the rays of the sun, and sleep when be is gone. Most scented flowers distribute their odor more liberally after dark, and some, like the tropical night-blooming jasmine, are odorless during the day and richly fragrant in the night hours.

Fig. 1. Foliolate Leaf.

(See page 665 ).

Of all the glorious bloomers of the night, none equal the yuccas. See them where you will, in the wild moonlight of the forests, or on the shore of some southern lagoon, they are always beautiful when in flower. But none are finer than the yucca of our northern gardens ( Y. filamentosa). When the hot weather comes it does not languish, but sends'forth a slender stalk little thicker than a man's finger and over six feet in length, bearing aloft a load of flowers that exceeds in number those of all its companions of the garden. Three hundred buds and flowers can often be counted on one panicle. The blossoms hang like drooping bells during the day, half shut and showing little vitality, but at dusk they begin to breathe forth pungent and peculiar odor, that increases as the night goes on. The Bowers change their attitude, the petals being drawn backwards until the blossoms become white six-pointed stars, that catch the moonlight and seem to retain it in their hearts. The plant has an alert, wide-awake look, very different from its dejected air in the daytime. At night the plants form deep shadows, pointed and mysterious, from which the glistening flowers stand forth conspicuously and invite us to a closer acquaintance with their best estate.

It is, after all, a mere figure of speech to speak of the sleep of the garden. Nature no sooner puts one set of plants to sleep than she supervises the labors and frolics of another. Night is full of life, as intense and as beautiful as that of the day, but not so fully appreciated by nature lovers.

Fig. 2. A Hybrid Rose. - Harison's Yellow X Rosa rugosa. (See page 665).

John DeWolf.