The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 | Page 8

that it cannot stand the frost.
Now we see the flowers in blossom in the vineyards of our friend Naboth and we know which we should most like in our own garden. There is an exquisite joy in begging or stealing a few seeds and bringing them home to blossom for us as they did for Naboth. I carry at this time a few small envelopes bought for a few pence a hundred at Straker's, and whenever I see something nice in seed I bag it. In another week it would drop beneath the plant it grew on and, not being cared for by a gardener, would be smothered or hoed up. In a nice little seed-bed all to itself it can unfold all manner of pleasure for its abductor.
Plant your flower seeds on a nice ripe, rich bed--that is, one compounded of old and even half-used manure. Keep the seedlings watered as they grow and by judicious pricking-out give them the room they need. About October you can plant the best of them in the place where you want a good bush next year, and, if it is a perennial, you have for many years to come a beautiful plant with a personal history. Even if you have bought your penn'orth of seed there may be a pleasant anecdote connected with it. My garden is at present amazingly blue with Dropmore Alkanet (Anchusa). Three years ago I bought three seeds for a penny. Two of them came up. I slashed up the plants and now I have half-a-dozen clumps as well as a similar number left in the old garden whence I have removed.
If you asked me what kinds of seed in particular you ought to plant for perennial flowers just now, I might want many more pages to tell you in. Let me give you a very short list of those that most appeal to me on the spur of the moment. It will be enough to go on with:--
Trollius (globe flower). Helianthemum (rock rose). Epilobium (willow herb).
Hollyhock. Echinops (globe thistle). Anchusa Italica, Dropmore variety.
Lupine. Tritoma (red-hot poker). Heuchera (coral-root). Yarrow.
Lychnis (garden campion). Inula (Elecampane). Funkia (Plaintain lily). Eremurus.
This list is representative because it includes some species, such as Eremurus, Trollius and Tritoma, that are not usually grown from seed by the amateur. To raise these rather expensive monsters from pennyworths of seed is a floral adventure which brings its own abundant reward.
I should be very proud of a garden that consisted entirely of plants that I had raised from seed. It might be one that had never had anything else in or the seedlings might gradually oust the bulbs and corms and grown plants with which the garden began. There would be many things there intrinsically as well as extrinsically valuable. Carnation seed, for example, is constantly producing new varieties, and to grow rose seedlings is even to court fortune. It is a long time before you see your rose. The seed takes sometimes two years to germinate, and then you have to wait a year or two before you get a typical blossom. The growers hurry matters by cutting a very tiny bud from the first sprout and splicing that on to an older stock. One of the advantages of having your roses grown from seed and on their own stocks would be that they could not produce wild suckers.
I have just seen a wonderful grove of Aquilegias, the glorified columbine which has the centre of one colour and the outside petals of another--sulphur with mauve or yellow with pink, and many other varieties. The nucleus was grown from shop seed and the rest from the seed of the first-comers. The only thing to choose between them is that the new ones have produced a least one variety not represented in the first batch. You may be sure that I am going to get some seed from here and raise some Aquilegias for myself. Good reader, go thou and do likewise.
G.G. DESMOND.

MIDSUMMER MADNESS.
We had come, "3.7" and I, to the Boundary, a white, unpaved road which winds across the full width of Wimbledon Common, from the old Roman camp to the windmill. Simultaneously we cried a halt, I because I never cross that road without some hesitation, he because he wanted to get out of the folding go-cart in which he had been riding and turn it, with the aid of a small piece of string and a big piece of imagination, into a 40-horse-power motor car.
On the map the road is not called the Boundary. If you want to know why I call it so I can only say that once you have crossed it things are different; I do not mean a difference merely of country or scenery, but a difference of atmosphere; better, and