There are other flowers for the blue border. It is pleasant to plant common Flax, if you have ample room; it is a superb blue; to many persons the blossom is unfamiliar, and is always of interest. Its lovely flowers have been much sung in English verse. The Salpiglossis, shown on the [opposite page], is in its azure tint a lovely flower, though it is a kinsman of the despised Petunia.
How the Campanulaceæ enriched the beauty and the blueness of the garden. We had our splendid clusters of Canterbury Bells, both blue and white. I have told elsewhere of our love for them in childhood. Equally dear to us was a hardy old Campanula whose full name I know not, perhaps it is the Pyramidalis; it is shown on [page 263], the very plant my mother set out, still growing and blooming; nothing in the garden is more gladly welcomed from year to year. It partakes of the charm shared by every bell-shaped flower, a simple form, but an ever pleasing one. We had also the Campanula persicifolia and trachelium, and one we called Bluebells of Scotland, which was not the correct name. It now has died out, and no one recalls enough of its exact detail to learn its real name. The showiest bell-flower was the Platycodon grandiflorum, the Chinese or Japanese Bell-flower, shown on [page 264]. Another name is the Balloon-flower, this on account of the characteristic buds shaped like an inflated balloon. It is a lovely blue in tint, though this photograph was taken from a white-flowered plant in the white border at Indian Hill. The Giant Bell-flower is a fin de siècle blossom named Ostrowskia, with flowers four inches deep and six inches in diameter; it has not yet become common in our gardens, where the Platycodon rules in size among its bell-shaped fellows.
The Old Campanula.
There are several pretty low-growing blue flowers suitable for edgings, among them the tiny stars of the Swan River Daisy (Brachycome iberidifolia) sold as purple, but as brightly blue as Scilla. The dwarf Ageratum is also a long-blossoming soft-tinted blue flower; it made a charming edging in my sister's garden last summer; but I should never put either of them on the edge of the blue border.
Chinese Bell-flower.
The dull blue, sparsely set flowers of the various members of the Mint family have no beauty in color, nor any noticeable elegance; the Blue Sage is the only vivid-hued one, and it is a true ornament to the border. Prunella was ever found in old gardens, now it is a wayside weed. Thoreau loved the Prunella for its blueness, its various lights, and noted that its color deepened toward night. This flower, regarded with indifference by nearly every one, and distaste by many, always to him suggested coolness and freshness by its presence. The Prunella was beloved also by Ruskin, who called it the soft warm-scented Brunelle, and told of the fine purple gleam of its hooded blossom: "the two uppermost petals joined like an old-fashioned enormous hood or bonnet; the lower petal torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe,"—and he said it was a "Brownie flower," a little eerie and elusive in its meaning. I do not like it because it has such a disorderly, unkempt look, it always seems bedraggled.