In the Garden Up to this date the garden has
owed more than usual to the very common flowers. For a number of weeks by far the most beautiful thing in our garden has been a low bank (with a sweet- briar hedge on the top) which was planted with yellow Alyssum chiefly to keep the weeds down. It has served its purpose and proved as brilliant as the gorse on the common. Those who grow that yet 'commoner plant, the so-called double Arabis (which has been long enough in the stalk to be useful in vases), may care to notice a botanical oddity in the plant. The flowers are not double, in the usual sense, but consist of what is essentially one flower inside the other. The commonest roses have been a stand-by. The Gloire de Dijon was blos- soming freely quite a long time ago ; and while the heavily- pruned bedding roses and the much too heavily pruned Poulsen polyanthus roses have been scarified by frost, the unpruned bushes of Zephyrine Drouhin have been a glory of alternate red and green foliage and are flowering freely. It is one of the stricter laws laid down by the owner of one of the most expensive gardens in England, if the adjective is allowable, that no polyanthus rose may be pruned back ; and though the prohibition is rather too drastic, it makes possible some glorious and unwonted spectacles. W. BEACH THOMAS.
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