Grass Walks through the Copse.
It may be useful to describe a little more in detail the plan I followed in grouping Rhododendrons, for I feel sure that any one with a feeling for harmonious colouring, having once seen or tried some such plan, will never again approve of the haphazard mixtures. There may be better varieties representing the colourings aimed at in the several groups, but those named are ones that I know, and they will serve as well as any others to show what is meant.
The colourings seem to group themselves into six classes of easy harmonies, which I venture to describe thus:—
1. Crimsons inclining to scarlet or blood-colour grouped with dark claret-colour and true pink.
In this group I have planted Nigrescens, dark claret-colour; John Waterer and James Marshall Brook, both fine red-crimsons; Alexander Adie and Atrosanguineum, good crimsons, inclining to blood-colour; Alarm, rosy-scarlet; and Bianchi, pure pink.
2. Light scarlet rose colours inclining to salmon, a most desirable range of colour, but of which the only ones I know well are Mrs. R. S. Holford, and a much older kind, Lady Eleanor Cathcart. These I put by themselves, only allowing rather near them the good pink Bianchi.
3. Rose colours inclining to amaranth.
4. Amaranths or magenta-crimsons.
5. Crimson or amaranth-purples.
6. Cool clear purples of the typical ponticum class, both dark and light, grouped with lilac-whites, such as Album elegans and Album grandiflorum. The beautiful partly-double Everestianum comes into this group, but nothing redder among purples. Fastuosum florepleno is also admitted, and Luciferum and Reine Hortense, both good lilac-whites. But the purples that are most effective are merely ponticum seedlings, chosen when in bloom in the nursery for their depth and richness of cool purple colour.