BLUE SUPERSTITIONS.
A quaint comment on the fashion in blue borders and blue gardens, of which something was said in this place a few weeks ago, appears in a charming little French book, Laura's Garden, by the Count de C ' ges (Allen and Unwin, 5s.). Thus : " The doctors are agreed that a love of blue and mauve flowers is a symptom of neurasthenia " ! The queer superstition arouses an ardent confession of faith that is worth quotation. Blue flowers " are the rarest, the most delicate of all. There is the blue ground-ivy that sprouts between the stones of the dusty roadside ; and the Salvia patens, that when it leaves the hothouse is like a Paradisal velvet. There is Nigeda, the blue of innocence, which the Germans call Gretchen hinter den Standen or Jangler int Griinen and the English Love-in-a-mist. There are the Phoenician Mulleins, whose very name sets one dreaming ; the delicate plumbagos, a thought chlorotic ; and since this is becoming quite a list we must not forget the cornflowers of every shade, the forget-me-nots, the Nepalese aconites, the pharmaceutical borages, the generous buglosses, the anchusas. the violas, the irises . . ." Personally, I think the wild flower that I most enjoyed discovering was a blue pimpernel (on a dusty road in Majorca) ; and I have found no rock plant more useful than the polysyllabic but hardy ornitholagum Cappadociae.
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