My Garden in Spring 



tion and absence of the weathercock giddiness that is 

 influenced by gusty Fashion with a large F if you please. 

 Buy as many Scilla bifolia as you can afford, then, but 

 choose them a permanent home. Among the roots of a 

 wildish group of briar roses is a good situation, or even 

 among dwarf heaths, so long as they are not the red carnea 

 the flowering periods of these two coinciding and proving 

 somewhat too competitive to please me ; but almost any- 

 where will do among permanently planted larger plants that 

 can stand a spring carpet of blue at their feet. Then leave 

 them alone to seed and multiply and replenish the earth. 



There is a great charm about the red, polished noses 

 they thrust through so early, and which, on a sunny 

 day, suddenly split asunder and reveal the neatly-packed 

 flower-buds, looking like a blue ear of wheat. This is 

 only promise, and the reward comes when the two leaves 

 lie close to the ground, and the blue spikes are feathery 

 sprays. It sometimes happens that the collected bulbs 

 have a few Chionodoxas mixed among them, but there 

 is no harm in this, as the colours do not fight at all, 

 and the Chionodoxas carry on the flowering for a week 

 or two. I have purposely mixed them in a large bed of 

 briar roses that I am allowing to carpet itself with them. 

 The Scilla comes first, then C. sardcnsis, followed by the 

 interesting bi-generic hybrid forms known as Chionoscillas, 

 which are sure to appear wherever the two genera are 

 grown together. I believe C. Ludliae enters into most of 

 these rather than sardensis, but the early flowering of 

 Scilla is almost always inherited, and the hybrids flower 

 before Ludliae is fully open. The most easily noticed dis- 

 tinction between Scilla and Chionodoxa is the difference 

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