Sweet-scented December A little wild flower, now so sweet that
a head or two of it will scent a room, is too much neglected. A gardener, who has a very quick eye for wild nature, grows it in quantity (partly because it spreads whether you will or no). It is the butter-bur. Its Latin adjective of fragrans is handsomely earned. Doubtless it is a weed ; and if there is a definition of a weed it is a plant that interferes with others of superior beauty. The flowers are pallid and it is better to pluck them in bud. Their hairy stems (which attract the few insects about at the season, including hive bees) are apt to wilt. The leaves that follow are large and untidy; and the critics write of them as if they were as repellent as the great spotty circles of the Coltsfoot in the eyes of farmers. Yet the plant is worth while. It is as fragrant as the garden heliotrope and the scent scarcely distinguishable. I saw it and smelt it this week at the base of a vase of Iris stylosa, the loveliest of all our winter garden flowers ; and its lilac scent rivalled the lilac colour of the iris. Much fragrance belongs to winter. Viburnum fragrans is the sweetest of all the shrubs that grow, excepting V. Carlesii which is a little later, and it has been in flower for some weeks—in Berkshire for example.
W. BE-ten Tuoseis.
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