A Prolonged Season
Amongst the flowers proper to the season, especially dahlia, chrysanthemum and perennial aster, are an unwonted number of flowers that are altogether out of season. You could probably collect a bouquet of fifty sorts of blossom in most fair-sized gardens in the south of England. A reader of The
Spectator once contributed to my garden some plants of all the different sorts of oxlip, a wild flower that becomes rarer. They are flowering now and have been for some while, though their full season is the season of their cousins the primrose and the cowslip. That invincible shrub—best against a wall but good anywhere—ce_anothus, gloire de Versailles, has seldom bloomed so freely and freshly as now. Such bushes have a' double worth. We should be almost as fond of Rosa moschata floribunda as of mermaid, if it' were not that mermaid goes on and on, and its rival has the briefest splendour of blossom though it leaves abundance of beautifully tinted berries. Mermaid is quite supreme among climbers. There is one just outside Kew Gardens proper which has travelled about twenty yards and usually provides flowers about Christmas Day. W. BEACH THOMAS.
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