A VILLAGER'S FLOWER.
The bulbs, of course, make the cardinal interest of our spring gardens ; and at the moment the daffodils are opening before the crocuses are past their best or the snowdrops over. But bulbs are not the only pebbles on the beach, not the only gems ; and the rich gardener is apt to omit one plant very popular, and rightly popular, in country gardens. I mean the lung- wort. No flower more readily adapts itself to a rough place. It needs no cultivation. Thrust it into a barren bank and it enlarges itself and flowers " till all is blue." Not that its blue is any sort of rival to squill, chionodoxa, or the violas that are especially large and long-stalked this March. Indeed, the blue is apt to degenerate into pink, as in the forget-me-not and the viper's bugloss. One plant in my garden, growing over a sycamore root, deadly to most plants, has a mass of flowers all pink. But pink or blue, the lung-wort (which has many country names besides the ugly pulmonaria) blooms early and freely, and gives something different from any other early plant of spring. It should be worth the attention of our expert hybridizers.
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