fiS Bulletin 128. 



for color must be within tlie dahlia itself, but the standards must 

 first be chosen by some outside aid. If the American Dahlia 

 Society would register all dahlias, and give each one an official 

 description, ushig a cheap and sensible color-chart as a guide, 

 people could have some idea of what they are buying. PeJielope 

 is described by Dreer as white, tipped with purple ; by Piersonas 

 white, delicately tinted magenta ; by Rawson as pure white with 

 violet tips, and by Peacock as pure white, delicatel}' flaked with 

 lavender. This illustrates the difficulty of determining a second- 

 ary color of which a small amount is present. By crowding 

 together the petals with the hand the secondary color comes out 

 more strongly. Miss May Lo^nas and La Fratice (Maule's) belong 

 to this same class. Their beauty lies in these delicate secondary 

 tints which are all of purple origin and can never be fixed. Dilute 

 purple sufficiently and you get what Mr. Mathews calls crimson- 

 pink. This crimson-pink has two bad faults : it is inclined to be 

 laid on unevenly in patches and veins instead of being evenly 

 suff"used, and it is so variable in quantity and quality as to make 

 it a lottery what sort of a flower one is to get. There is only one 

 pink dahlia I know of (for A . D. Livoni and Ethel Vick seem to 

 be identical) that shows no trace of a purple or crimson origin. 

 I shall not have a particle of faith in the stability of any other 

 dahlia advertised as pink until I see it. Mrs. Gladsto?ie is a very 

 much praised variety and at Ithaca in 1896 it had a very beauti- 

 ful and uniformly suffused light pink. I expected to recommend 

 it as among the very best, and should surely have done so if I 

 had not seen flowers from two other localities which betrayed the 

 origin of this pink. They showed two difierent degrees of a 

 hateful purple and I should never have supposed them to be the 

 same thing. Whenever the words "lavender" * 'rosy -pink" or 

 ''violet' ' appear in d-escriptions of dahlias one may feel almost cer- 

 tain that they refer to this treacherous crimson-pink. Sometimes 

 these tints are pretty well fixed, e.g. the lavender in A^-abella. 



The variety commonly known as Mme. Moreau would pass for 

 for a pink until brought side by side with A. D. Livo?ii, when 

 the purplish cast of the former is evident. In "selfs" i.e. flowers 

 having but a single color, these shades are practically fixed and 

 uniform, but variegated dahlias containing degrees of purple, 



