In the Garden The loveliest thing of the week—alas! not
in my own garden—was undoubtedly a bed of the winter-flowering cyclamen, Cyclamen coum, a mass of dark soldanella leaves covered with hundreds of pink, magenta, and almost white inside-out dolls' sunshades. This glorious bed, completely exposed on a cold hillside, was just at its best. But it had been in bloom for weeks. Among it were odd corms of a hybrid produced by constant seeding. They had ivy-marked leaves, very like the leaves of dog's-tooth violets. In the clear spring sunshine the whole bed looked extraordinarily cool and delicate. This hardy little creature is clearly a thing that no gardener should be without, in spite of the fact that Farrer, who had a magenta-complex, was very lukewarm about it. But happily even Farrer was occasionally wrong.
H. E. BATES.
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