FLOWER COLOURS,
No gardener, however expert, can keep up with the names, much less the nature, of new varieties of flowers. To take only two classes, every year several hundred varieties of sweet peas and roses are produced. Most of us, therefore, can only take heed of the more startling developments. For a good many years there seems to have been a searching after new and startling reds, some few of them much more emphatic than lovely, In this class perhaps the most glaring of all is the poppy named Lord Lamboutne. The red of the petals, which are of a curiously frayed pattern, is almost blinding. What a very queer blue-red is the vivid Lychnis rdscaria splendens! How individual a red is the early and long- flowering -gladiolus, Ackerman or Cardinalis ! Among sweet peas, the fashion in light fiery yellow-reds is carried on a step by the new Wizard. Many of the newer lupins —a flower whose popularity in Britain astonishes American gardeners—have new tints in slate-blue and pink-red. Geum siberieum is as red as Mrs. Bradshaw, and its quaintly separated petals make it a very salient flower in a rock garden. What a gorgeous junction of purple and blue in a host of the new delphiniums, Joybells for example. There are no really blue roses or sweet peas yet, or yellow sweet peas ; but every colour has been painted on the salpiglossis and nemesia, and on the carnation—of which the Alwoodii continue to produce new forms—by British nurserymen, and on the tulip by the Dutch. They almost attain to black and green—. the two most evasive shades for the selector or hybridizer,
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