My Garden in Spring 



before Christmas for the last four years. So every year I 

 like to buy a few hundred collected bulbs to make fresh 

 colonies, and enjoy their early flowers. G. Elwesti, though 

 not quite so early, yet will make a fair show in December 

 if planted as soon as the bulbs are imported in August or 

 September. Until I bought and planted them so early in 

 the season I never had much success with either of these, 

 but last season a three-year-old planting had not only 

 increased well by offsets but seedlings appeared in most 

 promising profusion, and especially round the byzantinus 

 parents. Before the old year has gone I look for G. cilicicus 

 to be showing buds at least. It is a tall, slender form of 

 G. nivalis, with very glaucous leaves. Although described 

 in catalogues as November flowering, I do not get 

 blossoms here until late December or January, and expect 

 it is only newly-imported bulbs that flower in November. 1 

 It was especially good in the winter of 1911-12, as though 

 it appreciated the extra cooking it got that summer. 



Between Christmas and the New Year I like to clean 

 up some corners where I have clumps of a very fine form 

 of the Neapolitan Snowdrop, G. Imperati. I believe it to 

 be the one that should be called var. Atkinsit, after its 

 introducer, Mr. Atkins, of Panswick in Gloucestershire, 

 whose name lives also in the fine garden form of Cyclamen 

 ibericum known as Atkinsii. Canon Ellacombe gave me 

 this Snowdrop and quite half of my garden treasures 

 besides, and it is one of the floral treats of the year to see 

 it in January growing over a foot high under the south 



1 G. cilicicus has given me the lie, as plants love to do, by opening several 

 Bowers on the 3oth November 1913 on clumps undisturbed for three years. 

 48 



