T THE JANUARY FLOWER-GARDEN. HEpoet who liked everything in its proper
season, and who wrote- " In winter I no more desire a rose
Than ask for snow in May's new-fangled joys," would have been considerably put about to apportion the various flowers to their seasons during the last weeks of the year which ended on Tuesday. Nearly every winter somebody who rejoices in a particularly well-sheltered garden writes to the papers to inform the public that he has had growing in his garden on Christmas Day some unnatural medley, such as wild strawberries, primroses, and holly-berries. But this winter almost all the gardens have been alike. Except for one or two freakish early freezings, which began actually before the end of August, and in some counties came down on exposed ground hard enough to kill off all the dahlias in October, there was practically no frost before the New Year at all. Instead, there was some extraordinarily warm weather in December, and the result was not only that a very large number of the late summer flowers lingered on into a year in which they had no business, but that some of the early spring flowers were hurried on into surprising growth and abundance. The roses were perhaps less noticeable survivors than others. Almost every garden holds the old pink monthly rose, or the Quarter Sessions rose, as the sturdy English gardener got to call the rose de guatre saisons. (He was the same gardener who knew lobelias as " low-bellies " and calceolarias as "castle- areas.") Roses may look wan and wet and undesirable at Christmas, but they do not look unfamiliar; though, for that matter, it is not very often that New Year's Day sees sweetbrier roses still bursting into bud as they budded in May, which was the case this year with some of the hybrid Penzance briars. Other flowers have bloomed more unnaturally late. It takes very little frost to finish off a nasturtium, and to hang on the fence a yellow, dripping, shrivelled corpse instead of its strong, sappy shoots. But this year the nasturtiums in many gardens at Christmas were still flaming red and orange where they had not been too roughly treated by wind and rain, and they have had plenty of cheerful neighbours. The common St. John's wort has not ceased flowering since the summer, and its taller relation, the Hypericum nepalense, is still opening its butter-coloured buds ; hydrangeas are still in bloom, though the tints have changed on them like the hues of shallow sea- water ; belated Canterbury bells shake in the wind; and most belated of all, the great Californian poppywort, .Romneya Coulteri, tried in the last week of December to expand its splendid white petals, but the bitter North-Easter stopped that untimely effort. All this would be nothing wonderful in Cornwall, or on the coast of Ireland washed by the Gulf Stream ; but it does not happen often in English gardens at all exposed to wind and frost.
The blossoms which belong by right, of course, to the deep midwinter of the New Year are chiefly those of flowering shrubs. There are one or two smaller plants which seem to prefer cold weather for rather obscure reasons ; there is the winter heliotrope, for instance, which carries the other names of tussilago or petasites fragrans, though it really belongs to the coltsfoots. It is a puzzling plant, for not only does it put out its wonderfully fragrant flowers when there are no bees to fertilise them, but a few degrees of frost knock it over com- pletely. Its leaves will recover, and stand up again if the sun shines on them; but frost seems to catch hold of the stalks of the flowers more tightly than the stems of the leaves. If it were not one of the greediest and most persistent flowers in existence, a few hard winters would surely end it completely. But it feeds so ravenously, and its creeping roots push so obstinately under the surface, that few other plants can live in the same ground with it. For that reason it is less welcome in the flower-garden than its other January companions, the hepaticas and the white-flowered hellebore, a little contradictorily distinguished as "niger," and better known, of course, as the old-fashioned Christmas rose. But the hepaticas, perhaps, belong no more exclusively to January than to February or March. For simple charm, however, not one of the winter flowers can equal the winter aconite, which in an early season begins in December to thrust up its strong little neck, bent like a shepherd's crook above its shining, green- frilled cup. That is the brightest of all midwinter low-growing flowers. The only brighter blossoms belong to shrubs; but what a gay company the shrub flowers can be, even in the coldest wind and snow. Of all fragrant flowers there it hardly one sweeter than the stiff-stalked Chinese honeysuckle, which sheds its light-green leaves and pushes out above them into the winter sunshine its strong, creamy buds ; though in beauty of form as well as in fragrance it is perhaps less
attractive than the garland flowers, the old, well-known Daphne mezereum and other rarer kinds, like the Daphne dauphinii. The mezeremn varies curiously; Gilbert White
noticed it coming into flower as early as the middle of Decem- ber, but it will sometimes keep its buds back until the end of January. The mezereum ought to belong exclusively to Japan, for the grace and qnaintaess with which it crowds its pink blossoms on its grey-green leafless boughs belong essentially to strange and scented paintings of flowers
and fans. But it is a European shrub ; the Daphne dauphin is Caucasian, and its lilac-rose flowers are
half hidden by shining evergreen leaves. Three or four other evergreens are better known. There are the arbutuses, with their hanging scarlet fruit, which looks almost as unreal in winter snow as their waxy flowers, clustered like grape-bunches of white biscuit-china; and there is the laurestinus, commonest and most charming of all, for the least pretentious and most ignorant gardener in the world can grow laurestinus and delight in its flat, table-like clusters of pink buds bursting into snow-white. With the laurestinus
ought to be bracketed, for charm and ease of growth, the yellow winter jasmine, whose pale stars gleam on country cottages in the half-lights of the January day almost as if they were separate lights in little cottage windows of their own. Much less common and odder in the shape of their flowers are the Australian grevilleas, of which one, the rosstarinifdia, clusters its deep-rose flowers in bunches rather like a number of small red snail-shells. That is perhaps the most brilliant of the blossoms of midwinter flowering shrubs ; but the quaintest of all is the flower of the witch-hazel. Pale-yellow petals, thinly streaked at the base with crimson, stare and twist from hairy cups. . If these are examined beneath the microscope, the beauty and ingenuity of the arrangement of the flower, packed in separate fur coats to protect it from frost, are astonishing in their glowing colours and complete security of design.
A winter which opens mildly finds many of the late summer- flowering shrubs still pushing out buds in December. This year, shrubs like the Chinese abelia, with its wealth of scented flowers, have been shedding belated buds in early January; they have come near to blossoming, but the cold has been too much for them. Some of the ceanothuses, which usually finish for the year in November, carry their feathery white or blue blossoms on stems which have shed their leaves; and the curious desfontanea, holly-leaved but not a holly, can be found even now forming new buds to
• blossom out into the upturned, scarlet and yellow trumpets which thrust so oddly and unexpectedly from their familiar- looking spiky foliage. It is quite a mistake, by the way, to suppose, as some of the garden-books will inform you, that this most interesting little shrub cannot be grown except close to the sea. The writer has seen it flourishing on a southern bank, open to frost and only partially protected from rough winds, in a rock-garden nearly twenty miles inland. Perhaps the original mistake was due to experiments with weakly plants. But there is a great deal still to be learnt about the action of ft() it upon so-called semi-hardy plants and shrubs. Not long ago it was thought impossible to grow a particularly beautiful tree heath, the Erica matrons, in England. As a matter of fact, if it is protected from northern winds, it begins to open its flowers in January, and blossoms far into the spring. In form it is more beautiful than any other heath; but it has not the wealth of bloom in early winter of the hardier hybrid heath, the cross between Erica cornea and Erica mediterranea. The last does not flower till March, but the hybrid glows into flame in December.
Other flowers in the rock-garden may be survivals from the summer or heralds of the spring. There is hardly a month in the year in which you cannot find, in a large garden with different situations for different plants of the same kind, the wonderful deep-blue blossoms of the quaintly named grom well, one of the flowers which is better known by its Latin name, Lithospermum prostratum. No gentian burns with a deeper, purer blue than that little flower; but it is not a blossom which belongs peculiarly to January. No more is the queer- shaped Polygala chamaeburus, one of the milkworts, an odd, mauve-and-cream-colour blOssom which looks as if it were putting out a tiny yellow tongue at you ; nor is the coarse ragwort Manna cheirifolia, with its stiff,
spat ulate leaves and undistinguished daisy-like flowers, though that also blooms in mild winters. But there is one plant which perhaps, of late years, has really established itself as a January flower. It is an artificial, introduction, of course, but its colour must excuse the faults of artifice. It is the genuine dark-blue primrose ; the primrose whose blue is the blue of ripe grapes, with a glint of port-wine red in it, and a scarlet ring round its glowing yellow calyx. The wood primrose can always be found in January; but it is often stunted, small, and frost- bitten. But the blue primrose blossoms strongly in all the snows and winds. With its change of colour it has somehow changed, too, its nature. It may be an April flower, but it is certainly one of the flowers of midwinter ; it may crowd its blossoms thicker in a later month, but its pro- found and glorious blue—Homer's wine-dark blue—belongs to the January snows.
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