202 The American Flower Garden 



in the catalogues, and there is no generally accepted colour scale 

 as a guide. The standardising of colours is the most crying need 

 in the trade. What is a &quot;lovely rosy purple&quot; to the Dutchman 

 may be an excruciating magenta to you or me. French dealers, 

 apparently, have a truer eye for colour, and their enlightened 

 republic publishes a chart of standardised colours. The lament 

 able truth is that, as yet, an insignificant number of cultivated 

 Americans take a sufficiently keen interest in their gardens 

 to insist that they reflect their own taste, not the nurseryman s 

 nor the gardener s. Very few complaints are received when 

 orders are not filled accurately; a phlox is a phlox to the vast 

 majority of people who have not learned to discriminate between 

 the washy pink-purples of old stock that is trying to revert to the 

 type and the brilliant orange scarlet of the Coquelicot, the finest 

 red yet known, the great white snowballs of the Queen that blows 

 later than the lovely Miss Lingard, and the soft chamois rose 

 and salmon tints of new hybrids. Indeed, many catalogues 

 merely offer hardy phloxes of assorted colours at so much a dozen, 

 with no attempt at a description. Yet an indiscriminate collec 

 tion of perennial phloxes is, perhaps, the most excruciating of 

 all eye shockers. 



The cheapest way to grow many of the perennials and biennials, 

 and usually the surest method of getting only those you want, 

 is to grow them from seed collected from friends. One of the 

 most beautiful hardy gardens I ever saw was in England, and 

 the hundreds of vigorous plants had actually cost the owner, the 

 rector of a village church, less than ten shillings. Specialising 

 at the outset on a strain of superb larkspurs grown from seed 

 given him by a parishioner, he had worked up a stock for exchange 

 with specialists in other perennials until, after eight years, he 



