IT is springtime in Charleston, South Carolina, and the old
town is filled with tourists come to see her famous gardens.
Among them is Mrs. Oscar B. Tutwiler, the vitamin-irradi-
ated gardener of Julian Meade Adam's Profession and its
Conquest by Eve. Mrs. Tutwiler ignores her Negro guide
while she takes charge and discourses to her friends:

". . . This," she exclaims, stopping by an English holly . . .
"is that darling of the Ilex family, Ilex aquifolium. Isn't it
superb? And it's another superb treasure the Yankees can't
have. Doesn't like New England winters and I can't blame it.
Now, Boy, you must be sure to tell the visitors that it's aqui-
folium. Don't you mix it with yunnanensis.

"Why, only the other day I was telling Oscar B. that I had
never given the Ilex family the attention they deserve. I've
never grown any except aquifolium and that plain, vulgar
American one, Ilex opaca. But Oscar B. seems to think I
should keep to the same old varieties. Sometimes I feel that
Oscar B. has so little zest when it comes to horticulture. He'll
buy me anything in the world but he leaves me too much by
myself. . . ."

There have always been Mrs. Oscar B. Tutwilers in Amer-
ica; now they are merely more numerous than ever before in
a richer and more leisurely country. They were once mission-
ary-society ladies, crusaders for this or that Cause, or im-
placable hunters of Culture; recently they have gone in for
gardening. All over the country, garden-club ladies now dig,
weed, and reap; visit one another's gardens singly and in
droves; go off on long trips, called pilgrimages, to the famous
gardens of Charleston, Mobile, and Natchez. They pore over

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