COUNTRY LIFE
IT is a remarkable fact that in this most crowded country, which is said to suffer from nothing so acutely as " the urban mind," there flourish the finest flower-shows and agricultural shows that the world knows. Among these Chelsea %has no rival. It excels even such an event as the old quinquennial show at Ghent. England, again, is completely innocent of mountains ; yet at Chelsea nothing takes the eye of the visitor more saliently than the Alpine garden so-called. The Litho- spermum, that agrees so pleasantly with the tufted vetch in the upper Pyrenees, is as blue and flourishing among the stones of an almost urban English garden. The British have combed the world for flowers, though the traveller in plants now grows rare, though Kingdon Ward is one of the kings of the craft. We Lave combed the world ; but we have also made, created, invented, developed and so hybridised that new flowers are shown in quantity every year. The pursuit of new colours for this or that species is astonishingly successful. Long ago light blue was developed merely by selection out of the yellow-brown of the nemesia. At Chelsea were shown last week even scarlet and yellow delphinium (" Hercules" and " Moonlight ") and a yellow lilac (Primrose) and all sorts of new features on the face of carnations, especially Allwoodii. The ideal desired by the Director of Kew (in his ingenious book The Living Garden) is being realised that even the humblest amateur may be a research worker, an inventor. Why, I wonder, are the English, who so delight in new flowers, so shy of new or even various vegetables ?
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