* * * * GARDEN CATALOGUES.
The garden catalogues, with their coloured plates and yet more highly-coloured descriptions of garden flowers, enable us, more or less and with due reservations, to do the sort of thing that Bolingbroke regarded as impossible. We can think upon " fantastic summer heat " while we wallow in winter snows. Each January come the catalogues ; and every year we can mark a distinct extension of the possible glories of the garden. One of the latest is the production of a cosmos that is tolerably early ; and how many people have given up growing this lovely thing, in guise a sort of refinement of the Japanese anemone, because it did not flower tilt winter weather began to threaten its extinction. It is said among florists that the flower at present advancing most rapidly in public favour is the gladiolus, which has increased in gor- geousness of colour and variety only less than the salpiglossis. * * * *
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