There is a handsome Monkshood with pale yellow flowers that is well used in the garden of the White Lilies, and most happily in their near companionship. It is Aconitum Lycoctonum; a plant of Austria and the Tyrol. The widely-branched racemes of pale luminous bloom are thrown out in a graceful manner, in pleasant contrast with the equally graceful but quite different upright carriage of the White Lily. The handsome dark green polished leaves of this fine Aconite are also of much value; persisting after the bloom is over till quite into the late autumn.
Many of the charming members of the Bell-flower family are fine things in the flower-border. The best of all for general use is perhaps the well-known Campanula persicifolia, with its slender upright stems and its numbers of pretty bells, both blue and white. There are double
PURPLE CAMPANULA
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF
Miss Beatrice Hall
kinds, but the doubling, though in some cases it makes a good enough flower, changes the true character so much that it is a Bell-flower no longer; and we think that a Bell-flower should be a bell, and should hang and swing, and not be made into a flattened flower set rather tightly on an ungraceful, thickened stem.
Another beautiful Campanula is C. latifolia, especially the white-flowered form. It is not only a first-rate flower, but it gives that pleasant impression of wholesome prosperity that is so good to see. The tall, pointed spike of large milk-white bells is of fine form, and the distinctly-toothed leaves are in themselves handsome. Like all the Bell-flowers, the bloom is cut into six divisions—“lobes of the corolla,” botanists call them. Each division is sharply pointed and recurved or rolled back after the manner of many of the Lilies. This fine Campanula is not only a good plant for the flower-border, but also for half-shady places in quiet nooks where the garden joins woodland, in the case of those fortunate gardens that have such a desirable frontier-land; the sort of place where the instinct of the best kind of gardener will prompt him to plant, or rather to sow, the white Foxglove, and to plant the white French Willow (Epilobium).
Nothing is more commonly seen in gardens than wide-spread neglected patches of Campanula grandis. The picture shows it better grown. It spreads quickly and in many gardens flowers only sparingly, because the tufts should have been oftener divided. It is perhaps the most commonly grown of all, and though, as the picture shows, it can be more worthily used than is ordinarily done, it is by no means so pretty a plant as others of its family.