Spring Crocuses 



show to the very best advantage, and the yellow Crocus 

 is best planted alone, unless some early flowering white 

 vernus form be mixed with it, each in fairly large clumps, 

 and a few outliers of both kinds hobnobbing occasionally. 

 I meant to treat of the yellow Crocuses first, but find 

 it a bore to be too systematic, and I want to go on talking 

 of bold plantings in big borders and grass. The fat, 

 prosperous, gone into trade and done well with it, garden 

 forms of Crocus vernus are best used for colour masses. 

 The individual blooms strike me as coarse after the refined 

 true species. But used as I like the Dutch Yellow, they 

 look well. Margot, a soft lavender one, is best of all, and 

 looks more like some species a giant Tomasmt'anus, per- 

 haps than a florist's vernus, and I should like to have it in 

 thousands, and generally plant a new patch of about a 

 hundred each season. Purpureus grandiflorus is a fine 

 effective thing, especially if near a clump, and the scouts of 

 either army intermingling, of some lilac or striped variety 

 such as Mme. Mina or Sir Walter Scott. I do not care so 

 much for large clumps of any white form. At the back 

 of the borders they look too cold, and suggest unmelted 

 snowpats. One of the lawns here is divided from meadow 

 land by a light iron fence, and as usually happens the 

 mowing machine spares a strip a few inches in width of 

 the grass at the foot of the fence on the lawn side. I 

 noticed in a Norfolk garden a charming effect, where such 

 a sanctuary was peopled with a long line of Harebells and 

 Lady's Bed-straw, and the following autumn we turned 

 back our turf at the foot of the fence and planted Crocuses 

 as thickly as we could set them, and replaced the turf 

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