Summer's Relics
It is the amiable habit of some gardeners to make a list of the flowers in bloom on November 1st. I have seen a list of sixty odd compiled in a cottage garden of small dimensions though very intensively cultivated and planted. I do not know what this year's record is likely to be ; but both gardens and the wild arc astonishingly floriferous for the dates. Some waste places are completely white with the flowers of the dead nettle, which is perhaps the most continuous blossomer of all the plants there are. It excels even the groundsel or the camomile daisies that today whiten some of the lighter tilths of the Home Counties. One of the oddities of the year is the belated flowering of plants and hushes that were punished by the drought. In my garden one honeysuckle, two bushes of pints Japonica and two barberries are now flowering for the first time this year. They had been recently moved and had fought too hard a fight with the drought to think of flowering at their proper season. Was ever a season so profuse of seed ? Next door to one another in the corner of one bed are an early Michaelmas daisy, a Sweet William and a small bush of rue. The ground round about them is thick with seedlings of all three. Some of the Michaelmas daisies (seedlings self-sown last autumn) are considerable plants and now in flower. We have had two marvellous seedkig years :- how good only those who have left patches of garden to themselves will wholly appreciate.
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