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 more literally, a change of spirit. To put it bluntly, I never knew the reality of fairyland until I blundered across that road one grey gusty evening ten years ago, and heard the tall grasses whistling in the wind. Since then the road has always been a frontier, not to be crossed without preparation.
As “3.7” tumbled out of his go-cart I looked at my watch and saw it lacked but a few minutes to noon. It was just such a cloudless June day as must have inspired Shelley's Hymn of Apollo. No smallest cloud to break the dazzling blue; and, high above our heads, Apollo, standing “at noon upon the peak of heaven.”
If it had been Midsummer Day I should have thought twice about crossing the Boundary. As it was, we were quite near enough to the 24th of June to make it risky. So, as “3.7” bent a tangled head over the bonnet of his Daimler, I flung myself down on the level turf beside him and stared across the road.
Behind us and on either side were clumps of gorse bushes, and beyond them the immense level expanse of the open heath. Immediately in front was the road, sunk a foot beneath the turf, which comes right up to it, both on this side and that.