THE FLOEAL WORLD AXD GARDEN GUIDE. 167 



where some distinct and peculiar plant is required. To increase it 

 you have but to pot a few pieces of its fleshy roots, and when they 

 begin to grow freely, plant them out. 



Criiium capeme. — This superb lily-like plant, with graceful 

 dracaena-like leaves, and a long-necked bulb, is quite hardy, though 

 usually regarded as a plant of the stove. To grow this to per- 

 fection, plant it beside water in a sunny spot, in good loam, and 

 leave it alone. Or it may be grown in a pot, and from the 1st of 

 May to the 1st of August, the pot should be plunged one inch 

 deep in water. A few such plants in a garden will mark its pos- 

 sessor as possessing some taste, not so any quantity of ephemeral 

 subjects that make colour only, and sometimes not much of that. 



Dmccena australis. — Superb for elegance, and most tropical in 

 outline ; will live winter and summer in the warmer parts of Eng- 

 land. At Torquay or Exmouth, I should plant it out and leave it; 

 in cooler places I should keep it in a pot, and plunge it out all the 

 summer. 



Phormium tenax, the New Zealand flax, which almost rivals 

 the noble Cordyline indivisa in beauty, is quite hardy in all the 

 southern counties, and is everywhere a fine cool conservatory plant. 

 It requires a good loamy soil, and abundance of water. 



Belpliinium formosum is so well known that I am half ashamed 

 to mention it ; but I am justified, because very few do justice to it. 

 How superb are its huge spikes of flowers of a heavenly blue, and 

 how thoroughly hardy it is, and at home in any kind of soil. It 

 has one great enemy — the common slug, and that is its only enemy, 

 for neither frost, heat, nor wet injure it. Gather the seed as soon 

 as ripe, and sow it at once, and let the plants remain until the 

 following March, and then transplant them to where they are to 

 flower, and sprinkle soot, lime, or wood ashes amongst them, to 

 keep away the slugs. They improve every year, and are superb 

 when three years old. A fine eflect may be produced by planting a 

 large bed with them in rows two feet apart. When they show their 

 flower-spikes peg them down, and plant scarlet geraniums, in rows, 

 between them. Then you have intense scarlet and intense blue in 

 the same bed. When the delphiniums have done blooming, the 

 geraniums will begin to spread and hide them, and the bed will be 

 scarlet only. 



Aralia papyrifera. — This is the rice-paper plant of China and 

 Japan. It is superb in character, and usually quite hardy ; at all 

 events, it is so in Battersea Park. It may be kept in any dark place, 

 or under a greenhouse stage, all winter ; so any of our readers who 

 wish to make a small forest of it may do so without difilculty. 

 One or two plants on a lawn give a most refined air to the spot. 



Phytolacca decandra. — This is at once a curious and beautiful 

 plant, more curious than beautiful, perhaps, but eminently deserv- 

 ing a place in the shrubbery border. It has a turnip-like root, and 

 a huge herbaceous stem, which bears a long spike of fruits like 

 blackberries. Imagine a great cob of Indian corn, with these 

 blackberries instead of the usual grains of flinty corn, and you 

 have an idea of the nature of the fruit. As to its hardiness, I 



