Preparing for Summer
FASTERTEDE in the northern hemisphere finds all the world rising to a new birth, welcoming the new life which is everywhere upspringing after the death-like sleep of winter. The earliest flowers have such pure, clear tones of yellow, white and blue that they seem to bring sunshine and light and the summer skies down to earth to nestle amid the fresh greens of leaf-buds and grasses.
It is the beauty of wild Nature at this season that turns our thoughts to our gardens, where plans must now be matured for the coming year. The early bulbs are in full beauty and many have not yet flowered, but we must prepare already for their successors. Where narcissi and tulips are grown in borders it is well to sow patches of early annuals like Virginian stock among, the bulbs ; as the latter die down the annuals will cover them and flower until it is time to put out bedding plants. Cuttings of violas taken last autumn are now strong plants and can also be put out between bulbs. St. Brigid anemones and French ranunculuses should soon make gay splashes of colour. The latter are charming planted thickly amongst rose bushes, as their flowering time is fully a month earlier, and they tone so well with the reddish shoots which will soon cover the roses.
The choice of annuals is becoming more bewildering every year, so many exquisite new colours are appearing even amongst old-fashioned plants like snapdragons, which used to be chiefly dull purples. The new flame and apricot shades grown in a mass make a gorgeous sunset effect. Some of the new eschscholtzias are lovely shades, . and their finely cut glaucous foliage arranges itself delight- fully in vases. They flourish in dry, poor soil in full sunshine.
Trachyrnene coerulea is a useful flower for cutting, as it lasts well in water. It is a charming shade of blue. Annual larkspurs, dwarf cousins of the tall delphiniums, add lovely pinks and reds as well as blues to the colour scheme. Annual lupins are also well worth growing. Nigella " Miss Jekyll " is the best variety of this old favourite, and Phacelia campanularia gives us one of the loveliest blues amongst annuals.
No collection of hardy annuals will be complete without Shirley poppies, but to do them justice they should be sown very much more thinly than is usually the case, and after they start growing they must be thinned over and over again, just as often as they touch each other. I have seen a single plant of Shirley poppy ever two feet across. Grown like this they throw out side branches, and every shoot is covered with large blossoms and also with beautiful foliage—a thing never seen on crowded plants. Well-grown poppies, if their blooms are cut daily before seeds form, will flower from early summer till frost kills them.
It is the rarest thing to see any annual given space enough to develop. I wish seeds cost a penny each, for then some justice would be done to them. As it is they live the lives of congested slums, with the resulting diseases of rickets and anaemia.
Schizanthus and salpiglossis are two exquisite half- hardy annuals which can be grown either in the garden or as pot-plants under glass. The seeds must be sown in heat like all half-hardy annuals. When pricking out seedlings of double flowers such as stocks and carnations, it is well to bear in mind that no double blossom produces seed ; therefore,' seeds are gathered from single blooms of a strain of which the majority of blooms are double. It follows that every packet of seed will produce some singles and some doubles. When the seedlings are large enough to transplant, choose all the smaller, less robust ones to keep, for as a rule single flowers are the strongest growers. Many amateurs complain that their stocks are mostly single, but often this is due to their having thrown away the smaller seedlings which would have had double blooms, and retained only the sturdier singles.
Few biennials make a better show than Canterbury bells. They can be bought ready to plant out by gar- deners who did not sow them last year. Planted about two feet apart in rich soil they make vigorous growth, and if the faded blooms are snipped off just at their necks fresh ones will open. Another striking biennial is Cheiranthus allionii, a cousin of the old wallflower, but a vivid orange. There is also a mauve form (Lintfolium erysimum) and both are remarkably free bloomers.
It is pleasant to set apart one bed close to the windows for scented flowers only. And before stocking it read what Bacon has to say in this matter : " And because the Wrath of Flowers is farre Sweeter in the Aire (where it Comes and Goes, like the Warbling of Musick) than in the hand, therfore nothing is more lit for that delight, than to know, what be the Flowers and Plants, that doe best perfume the Aire. Roses, Damask and Red, are fast Flowers of their Smels ; So that you may walke by s whole Row of them and finde Nothing of their Sweet- nesse ; Yea, though it be in a Mornings Dew."
However, with Bacon's advice and a few modern additions we can insure " a most Excellent Cordial] Smell, in the Aire." Violets, mignonette, sweet-briar rose, and also the old white Jacobean rose, wall-flowers, pinks, honey-suckles, night-scented stock (Illathiola bicornis), night-scented tobacco (Nicotiana affinis), and the old white Madonna lilies will "Perfume the Aire most delightfully."
It is now fourteen years since the eyes of Londoners were gladdened by those exquisite window gardens which were as much a matter of course in the West-end during the season as were window curtains. We have irrevocably lost much in the War, but is it not time to return to window gardening 'I There are so many possible ways of planting window-boxes, from the sowing of a few annual: up to filling them with sub-tropical flowers and foliage or making wide, shallow boxes into tiny Japanese rock. gardens. A simple plan is to fill the boxes with cocoa fibre and then sink pots above the rims into the fibre. This keeps the earth inside the pots cool and damp, and allows one pot to be changed when desired without dis- turbing others. For a sunny window suitable plants are geraniums of any kind (the pink, ivy-leaved variety is lovely), small hydrangeas, marguerites (both white and yellow), heliotrope, tiny polyantha roses, fuchsias, petunias, or summer-flowering chrysanthemums. In partial shade spireas and ferns will flourish, and tuberous begonias will give a blaze of colour, while in full shade ferns and small evergreens will succeed.
Window boxes need almost daily root watering, which should be given in the evenings, and a dose of chemical manure or guano once a week. And in addition the plants enjoy an overhead sprinkling to cleanse and refresh the foliage. There is so much less smoke in London in 1928 than there was up to 1914 that a serious effort should be made to revive the window-garden habit.
F. E. SETON.
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