SPIRAEA. 



Sweet is the type of the next group, and. it would not be easy to find a 

 lovelier plant for the waterside. It has purple-leaved varieties, and 

 one with rosy flowers. S. Jcamschaticu. is the friend that we all learned 

 to know and love long since as 8. gigantea ; it is simply a Meadow 

 Sweet of 6 feet high and more, with magnified and splendid five-lobed 

 (not feathered) leaves, of clear green, and ihose overwhelming stems 

 topped by a wide foaming crest of creamy -white in summer. It 

 freely seeds itself, and is too gorgeous and tropical and rapid for any 

 use but that of making jungles in the bog-garden, where grown men 

 could play hide and seek. There is a variety with empurpled foliage, 

 and another with flowers in lighter and darker tones of creamy-pink. 

 Another superb Meadow Sweet, but exactly like our own in stature 

 and feathered leafage and looser spraying crests of blossom, is 8. 

 lobata from America, with flowers in the richest shade of raspberry- 

 fool pink, which deepens to a note in which the allowance of fruit is 

 much larger and that of the cream much scantier, so that the rasp- 

 berries richly prevail in S. I. venusta, often offered as a species, but 

 a form of S. lobata, especially opulent and ample, not only in colour, 

 but in growth and flower. And even 8. lobata venusta has a garden 

 form, sent out by catalogues that wish to be correct, as 8. lobata 

 venusta magnifica, from which compilation of epithets the portrait 

 of the plant may be imagined. 8. pahnata is different, though in 

 the same bog-garden style. This has the wide five-lobed green leafage 

 of S. faimscliatica, rather than the dark feathered, leaves of the 

 Meadow Sweet, and the sprayed flower-heads have the same wide 

 and foaming effect, though their stems be only some 21 feet high. 

 The flowers are of almost pure raspberry-and-red-currant-tart- 

 juice colour, with hardly more than a drop or two of cream to 

 fight en it, most sumptuous and appetising to see in summer, when 

 the rich jungles of the colony are awave beneath one's eye in their 

 ample flattened wide billows, so different from the more upstanding, 

 scattered, stiffer, sprays of the Meadow Sweet and S. lobata. In 

 gardens,too, there is a mysterious treasure often advertised as S.digitata. 

 This is no more than S. palmata ; but what nurseries ought to mean by 

 it, and usually do, is a most lovely variety of the type, with so com- 

 pressed a habit that the whole thing, flower-head and all, is hardly 

 6 inches high, though undiminished in size of blossom, richness of 

 colour, or dainty magnificence of crest. The foliage, too, is more deeply 

 lobed, and the flowers continue far on into late autumn, so that it is 

 the most precious of jewels for a moist cool comer on the choicest 

 rockwork, never ramping nor becoming invasive, but sitting close 

 in a neat clumped pyramid of leaf and flower. There are also other 



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