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And a highly successful hobby-turned-livelihood it is too.

Her house is called the "House of Weeds" but her own name for it is the "Menagerie."

In every nook in the large high-ceilinged rooms, along the ample screened porch are the materials of her trade—nearly fifty different varieties of weeds. Fungi, driftwood and dried plants of all types too are a part of the chaotic order that reigns in her large two-story white frame house on a quiet street in a once-elegant portion of the booming Southern oil capitol.

The street is quiet, that is when some twenty or thirty women aren't pulling their cars up to the curb preparatory to taking one of Mrs. Gordon's famous tours through the House of Weeds. Or when another smaller group, isn't coming by for a class lesson in flower arranging, dried material preparation or corsage making.

YOU CAN'T believe when you first hear about this remarkable business that anyone could have the nerve to sell "just weeds." As a laden-down customer once expressed it: "I never thought I'd see the day when I'd be paying money for Johnson grass!" But buy she did and so do hundreds of other women from the more than 100 garden clubs all over the city. They pay one cent a stalk for the Johnson and other grasses including wheat and oats; fifteen cents a stalk for dock and other prices for the harder-to-find and more ornamental dried materials. Mrs. Gordon charges all the way up to seventy-five cents for those in the latter group.

How Mrs. Gordon got on this unusual track is a story in itself. She attributes it to heredity, explaining that almost all members of her family have been collectors of one type or another during their lives. "We all had an affinity for secondhand furniture and knickknacks," she says, but none followed her into the weed field. She has been a collector of items of one kind or another for the last fifteen years but decided only last year to go into business.

What brought on the switch of a fifteen-year-hobby to a profitable business? Mrs. Gordon credits two things: "One, I accumulated so much stuff I just had to sell some of it. The garage, the closets, the cabinets, the attic—even the back yard was piled high with junk." And two: Her doctor told her that high blood pressure would no longer permit her to make the extensive outside lecture tours which carried her from garden club to garden club all over the Gulf Coast area (at no pay). During the Christmas season alone it was not unusual for her to deliver twenty-five lectures. More than fifty talks per year was an average schedule in pre-business days. Each talk meant she had to gather up material, put it into her car, drive to the scene of the club meeting, unload, then reload after the lecture. "It was getting so hard on me that I thought I'd stay home and let the garden clubs come to me," she relates.

WHY WOULD any woman want to drive the devious distance through the heavy traffic to Mrs. Gordon's north side home and end up paying a penny for a single stalk of Johnson grass when the waysides and fields are full of them? Because House of Weeds's Johnson grass isn't just plain old Johnson grass. You can buy it in one of nine different shades, for one thing. And it's all professionally dried so as to retain its full "beard." Mrs. Gordon, being a true collector, has the experienced eye, trained to distinguish the subtleties of shade in the different grasses. Anyone could find these varieties for herself—and all within the city limits. But it takes "the eye." And sometimes a lot of time and patience. It's easier to part with a penny.

The "collecting Gordons" (Mr. Gordon has been indoctrinated too) often drive into the country on Sunday afternoons replenishing the supply of one kind of weed, fungi or driftwood.

The collection trips are often hazardous. Mrs. Gordon recalls one time she plucked forty-two specimens of a variety of Elm fungus from a dead tree and came up with a healthy case of poison ivy. She saw the ivy, knew she was susceptible—but the fungi was too tempting a sight. In her girlhood a champion swimmer, Mrs. Gordon once had to dive into water over her head to procure a specimen. She thinks nothing of taking off shoes and stockings to wade out into a swamp or ditch for a choice item. Clippers and scissors are standard glove-compartment accessories in the Gordon car. Her husband, who has long ago ceased to express surprise at his wife's weed collecting operations, did make one choice comment which she still repeats: "Well, at first it was boots I needed to go out with you," he said, "Then it was hip boots. Now, by golly, it's a diving suit!"

The stock of the House of Weeds is replenished by yet another pipeline. Friends, making trips as far away as the Pacific Northwest or Mexico and Hawaii, bring her specimens. In Tennessee, her daughter's mother-in-law owns four mountains and these have yielded great quantities of treasure. Maple, dogwood and sassafras leaves have been plucked there, carefully dried and pressed between sheets of waxed paper, and placed in the Gordon collection.

Her teazle and mullein come from the Great Smokies, her woodroses from Hawaii, her smaller yucca from Colorado, spoon plant from Arizona and spike from the West coast.

Her driftwood comes from Texas beaches—the wide white kind unvisited by week-end crowds. A friend's pick-up truck is pressed into service for the driftwood expeditions. Usually it comes back loaded.

IN DRYING materials, there are accepted procedures. But the lady of the House of Weeds ignores many of these and goes calmly about inventing her own methods for curing and preserving her specimens. For one thing, the complicated sand method (which requires several hours of baking each day for several days) for retaining color in many types of flowers isn't used by her at all. She likes to let them dry naturally, then paint the color into them. Or she may be just as likely to leave them whatever color they happen to be when dried.

She paints many of her grasses too. Her mullein gets two coats of flat white. Sometimes she carefully spots it with a coral shade. She uses the plastic paints for most of her tasks and uses either brush or sprayer, depending on the job. Sometimes she gilds her leaves. Or she may "skeletonize" them as in the case of magnolia or orchid tree leaves. The skeletonizing process produces the ethereal Angel feathers which bring such high prices at the florists'. It's done by boiling the leaves for three hours in a mixture containing a bar of Octagon soap, a can of lye and water. The boiling takes place in a granite pan. Then the leaves are lifted out and soaked in a bucket of water in which has been placed a cup of bleach. When bleached out to a delicate whiteness they are ready to be allowed to dry.

Mrs. Gordon rarely ever hangs anything upside down to dry, except for coxcomb and the wild lion's tail which she grows in her own back yard. Most all of her grasses are dried straight up in a large urn or bucket.

For some items she has worked out unique "curing" methods of her own; Bells of Ireland, for example. "To my knowledge, I'm the only one who ever cured them," she says. Under her glycerine and water treatment, the bells come out a soft smoky white. She also believes she is the only one who has ever successfully dried hydrangeas. "Depends on when you take them," she says. The blooms have a warm golden cast when dried and she uses them extensively in her arrangements.

Mrs. Gordon's business has a special glamorizing' department too. Far from applying to the use of lotions and lipsticks, the Gordon glamor division concentrates on transforming unpromising chunks of wood into glittering bases for arrangements. To glamorize driftwood, she goes over it with a flat paint, then dusts it with glitter. She also glamorizes aspidistra leaves, palm (which she first cuts into irregular, free-form shapes) and stephanotis. She paints and dusts okra pods too which have a naturally graceful coil, useful in many types of arrangements. And immediately prior to Christmas, her gilding brush is busy glamorizing all manner of pods from gum balls to acorns and pine cones. And pine cones aren't just pine cones in the Gordon emporium, either. There are the hard, tightly-formed "bottoms" which she uses as dahlias or zinnias. There are the large loose ones which she calls "daisies" and the tip ends which she uses as buds.

Sometimes she even glamorizes corn shucks. All these items are brush painted. Often, though, in large arrangements, when all the materials are to be painted, she waits until the entire arrangement is completed and set up in the container. Then she spray paints the whole thing in a convenient corner of her kitchen. It's easier, she points out, than painting each item individually.

DURING MRS. GORDON'S first year of business she opened her home to free-of-cost tours by some seventy-five garden clubs. With an average of twenty women per trip attending, she received nearly 1,500 women in her home in that one operation alone during one year. Nearly all the women bought, though they were assured that they were under no obligation to do so.

In addition, during the spring and summer months, Mrs. Gordon holds classes on various phases of arrangement and corsage making. Her living and dining room have held as many as fifty women at one time during a class and she charges $5 for a five-week course consisting of one two-hour lesson per week. For a while she was holding three classes a week, but found that too hard with her tours and garden club work, so whittled it down to two classes per week, limit ten to a class. The beauty of it is that though the students are under no obligation to buy, they usually do end up purchasing considerable quantities of weeds from the teacher. There are also private lessons and Mrs. Gordon has coached a number to professional status in the florist business.

It isn't all work though, the way she tells it. When the students win with their arrangements in flower shows, they rush to relay the details of their triumphs to Mrs. Gordon. "That's pay, too, as far as I'm concerned," she says. She has a hard-and-fast rule that she won't help anyone make an arrangement for a show, though she'll be glad to criticize or suggest ideas and materials. Her favorite story, when asked if it takes a long time to learn the art, concerns three students. One was extra good even before she enrolled and admitted she just came for the "finishing touches." The other two had never arranged so much as a rosebud. Come flower show day and the two beginners came out first and second in the show, while the old-timer was third!

A GOOD many people ask Mrs. Gordon about volume. After all, they reason, you have to sell a lot of stalks of Johnson grass, for instance, before you even pay for the gasoline you've used on your collection trip. Mrs. Gordon has a story for that one too: She speaks of the time she and her husband gathered a whole car trunkful of grasses—oats and wheat mostly. A hard day's work it was too, she recalls. Sorted out, the unpromising looking mass turned out to be several thousand individual stalks. "I forget the exact number," she says, "but I do remember wondering how in the world we'd ever get rid of them." It took only about four garden club tours to do it and the Gordons were ready to start all over again. A friend down the street makes ceramic figurines and containers and these help sell Mrs. Gordon's dried materials. "During the last Christmas season, I had so many calls for arrangements using Madonnas that I had to sell my own—not without regret," she recalls with a smile. The fungi also go like hot cakes. "These come in handy in dried arrangements for covering up the mechanics," she explains, pointing out a number of driftwood arrangements in which a piece of fungus was cleverly dropped in to cover the needlepoint holder.

These tricks—and there are hundreds you can pick up in ordinary conversation with Mrs. Gordon—are revealed for the asking to the hundreds of garden club women who troop through the home annually. Usually there are some ten to fifteen arrangements on hand too, which the visitors may study at their leisure. "The more ideas they get the more need they'll have for materials," is Mrs. Gordon's philosophy.

There are several unusual off-shoots of Mrs. Gordon's weed selling that have also helped add funds to the family coffers. There are all-dried corsages for which she utilizes Hawaiian woodroses or silver acorns and tiny pine cones silvered during the holiday season. She makes up a supply of these permanent corsages and does a brisk business with them. Then there are other "permanent flowers"—roses out of deftly rolled bits of ribbon which she makes and sells. There are Christmas bells made out of ordinary chicken wire, the ends of which are tipped with tiny silver balls. "I took fifteen of them with me once on a trip to Galveston and sold every one almost as soon as I arrived," she says. She also cuts down overhead by utilizing such ordinary things as cake pans (the fluted kind), kitchen funnels and even the commonplace grater—glamorized with glitter—as containers or centerpieces with candles. She makes her own candles too. She makes fan shaped backgrounds out of ordinary screen wire, pressed into graceful, undulating folds. Her knack for utilizing these ordinary things—which most of us throw away—is perhaps the most important single key to her success.

Most garden club women, among whom Mrs. Gordon has a reputation of many years' standing, refer to the House of Weeds as "heaven." Others call it "crazy."

"Some say they can't see how I can stand it with all that junk around," says Mrs. Gordon. "But it isn't junk at all." True, the kitchen cabinets may be filled with corsage ribbons and the living room secretary drawers may be crammed with fungi and driftwood. The bathtub may be temporarily filled with a Clorox solution in which Mrs. Gordon is likely to be hopefully soaking a twisted tree root. And the standing electric fan may be all but obscured with the bunches of grass dangling from it in weird array.