I AM in a garden on a farm in Alameda county, near the hills, and about thirty miles from San Francisco. To-day is November seventh. There was a week of rain a while ago, which started the grass by the roadside and on the hills. It has grown so much now that I have just been watching a little girl pulling up handfuls from under the cherry tree to feed, with many a pretty whisper, to a pet colt in the barn yard.

The sky is clearest blue, and almost without a cloud. The air is warm and fragrant with blooming flowers. Some evenings we have a fire, and sometimes we do not need one. There will probably be several weeks of this kind of weather - then we shall expect more rain. But everything is now in good warm, "growing condition," and the men are cultivating in the orchard, to stir the surface and keep the weeds from growing. They have begun to prune the cherry trees, too, although the leaves are yet green, not shrivelled or turned yellow. It will not hurt the trees, this early pruning; they get more rest that way, and will bear better crops next year.

The large La Marque rose on the porch on the east side of the house has about eighty full-blown roses and several hundred buds on it. The Bank-sias, both white and yellow, are still blooming a little, but not like the La Marque. In the garden, one can gather hundreds of roses. Among them I notice Marechal Neil, La France, Duchess of Bra-bant, Triumph of Luxemburg, Safrano, Appoline, Jacqueminot, Rosamond, Cloth of Gold and Marie Van Houtte. Down in the nursery rows, three hundred yards north of the house, roses of all the leading sorts, two years old from cutting or bud are blooming so abundantly that they make quite a distinct feature of the November landscape.

I am very much attracted by the English ivy at this season. It blooms abundantly here in great upright spikes, frequently eight or ten inches long, and is continually haunted by bees, a dozen or so to every cluster of the yellowish flowers. There is nothing else in the garden now, not even the orange blossoms, that the bees like so well. Ivy has been planted about the walls of stone churches in San Mateo and Marin, and covers them to the eaves. There are also old sycamores in the neighborhood that are completely ivy-clad. At this season such ivied walls and trees are musical indeed !

Since the rains all the smilax vines growing over bits of fence and bushes, in various places, have taken a fresh start, and have thrown up long shoots from the ground. There are many seedlings about them, and the aforesaid little girl has gathered about two ounces of seed, to sell to some florist for "pin-money." There are hundreds of nasturtiums and morning-glories, springing up as fast as possible under the old vines, which have not yet done blooming. The last time I planted a lantana, it seeded the ground so heavily that I have never wanted another, even if it does "bloom all winter".

The heliotrope bed is one of the prettiest things south of the house. Not a leaf yet touched by the frost, and a mass of bloom most of the time for the last five years. Near by is a large vine of the Cat-alonian jasmine. It comes very near being a daily bloomer here, and covers a large part of the porch. The only enemy is the brown scale, and a little spraying cures that. The golden rod, grown from seeds gathered in New England, seem to have lost their bearing in this new climate. They grew large and strong, and began to bloom in July. They bloomed finely - as well as I ever saw them bloom elsewhere - and went to seed, but most of them have lately thrust out side-shoots, and are just begining again. The pale lilac New England asters knew better. They grew and bloomed all summer, but this Junelike weather does not seem to tempt them to an aftermath. There is a good deal of this second-blooming here. We cut the hollyhocks all back to the ground in early September, and by this time they have thrown up new blooming shoots, not quite so tall, but fully as floriferous as the first.

The cannas need no cutting back - they will bloom on for weeks to come.

There are some things that a stranger would especially notice in the grounds. The largest Magnolia grandiflora, for instance, shows by its beautiful red, imbricated seed-cones that it bloomed abundantly in its own season, and yet there are open flowers and buds on its topmost boughs. The banana, not the hardy Abyssinian sort nor the dwarf, but a common yellow-fruited sort, stands in a sheltered spot, a very handsome large plant. About one winter in five it is killed to the roots, but always sprouts out again. Near it are large orange and lemon trees, heavily fruited and in bloom. A plant of the Brug-mansia suaveolens, perhaps five feet high, is loaded with its large sweet, white flowers. This sounds semi-tropical, certainly, and innumerable such illustrations of the climate could be given from plants within sight of where I sit and write this. But, on the other hand, at the corner of the kitchen is a pile of boxes of winter apples and pears, grown in the orchard, a quarter of a mile distant; grown on the same kind of soil, at the same elevation, with the same exposure ? There are Bellflowers, Baldwins, Newtown Pippins, Limber Twigs, Spitzenburgs, Jonathans, and all the old apples, with a few California seedlings besides ; there are Easter Beurre, Winter Nelis, Beurre Clairgeau, and other winter pears.

But I must not wander so far away from the garden, in the midst of which I sit in my shirt-sleeves this warm November afternoon, and watch the men at work in that curiously confusing way incidental to California. One man is replanting daffodils and paper-white narcissuses which have become too crowded, but some of those he takes up are ready to bloom and, in fact, some which he left have been in bloom a week and more. Another is pruning cherry-trees. Still another is plowing in the orange grove. A fourth is bleaching and sacking walnuts and almonds which have been drying on wooden frames in the sunlight. Many different operations of field and garden mingle strangely at this season here. The house-servant goes down to pick blackberries for tea, and passes men digging blackberry plants for sale, and others planting out blackberry roots for sale next winter. The same may be said of raspberries and strawberries. There are ripe berries, green berries and blossoms often on the plants dug up to be sent away.

*• I don't know which to do first to-day," said one of the men a little while ago, " whether to sow peas in the vegetable garden, or gather the quinces and box them for market".

I have been walking around the garden again, just to notice what I find in bloom, I have rather a dislike for the set lists, in double columns, of "flowers blooming at noon on January 1, in the south-west corner of Smith's old sheep pasture." The botanical journals do not print such things as often as they did 15 years ago. I would rather make one feel, if possible, the wealth of color and fragrance in the air of this warm Santa Clara valley, hardly four miles from the bay of San Francisco. I have told you of the bees in the ivy. The humming-birds gather about the great abutilon bushes, so laden with drooping turbans of mottled carnelian. If we did not cut the plants nearly to the ground every year, they would be trees, 20 feet high. They bloom unceasingly, just as the fuchsia-hedges do, and over them the humming-birds poise and dart with their gleaming, musical motion. But if I were making a list ? Then I should not forget the wide chrysanthemum beds, named varieties staked up, and ready to go on till Christmas. Nor the masses of cosmos, just in their prime ; nor the dahlia, geranium, gladiolus and petunia. The Anemone japonica is still blooming, as it has for months, one of the most satisfactory of all our garden favorites.

There are pansies still, the violets have come, and, as I have hinted, the daffodils will be here before many weeks. Of such fiber is woven the warp and woof of California gardening; almost perennial life, almost perpetual growth, burden the soil with surprises. And what is that so spicily fragrant in the air, as the south wind blows across the avenue ? Only the lo-quat blossoms (Mespilus japonica); and by April the clusters of yellowish sub-acid fruits will be ripe. In all the sweep of vision, hardly anything except the large American tulip tree (liriodendron), and the rows of Japanese persimmon trees show autumn garbs. The leaves of the former are golden yellow ; the latter is loaded with rosy, crimson and purple leaves, magnificent in shading and artistic effect. The American black walnut and some of the Persian walnuts begin to look quite like winter, but the figs still hold their green leaves and ripe fruit, and the pecan avenue is as beautiful as in mid-summer! A horticulturist, used only to climates of sharply contrasted season, is struck with a sort of bewilderment at such a state of affairs, - but I have written down, with strict attention to details, the everyday aspects of early November here.

Charles Howard Shinn.

Alameda County California.