My Garden in Spring 



had it this Spring. A. hortensis has been mentioned in an 

 early chapter as having typified and announced the Spring 

 in Greece to me, a wanderer on its hillsides. I wish this 

 race might have borne some other name, for it is one of the 

 most magnificently coloured of all wild plants : its varieties, 

 fulgens of the Pau district and graeca from Greece, have 

 never been improved upon by garden-raised seedlings. 

 Sutton's Strain, or the Aldboro' lot, fall far short of those 

 I saw on a bank edging the Olive gardens on the road to 

 Kephissia, outside Athens. There grow the true broad- 

 sepalled graeca form, and not only scarlet forms but of 

 every shade of cerise, salmon, and some pure white all 

 over, others with broad, white rings in the centre of the 

 rosy flowers. I had seen a few of these mixed with the 

 normal scarlet being sold in tight little bunches in the 

 market-place, but could not learn whence they came. 

 Daily excursions from Athens did not reveal the secret 

 until, chasing a magnificent Lacerta ocellata (the great- 

 eyed lizard), I crossed this bank, forgot the Saurian and 

 dug the plants. 



The first Anemone of the season here is another Greek 

 plant, A. blanda. I have seen it in flower before Christ- 

 mas at Bitton, but never before mid-January here. Our 

 earliest form is in a broad edging at a corner of the large 

 herbaceous bed, and resulted from a planting of some 

 collected tubers. They are mostly of rather a pale blue, 

 and have well-marked, white eyes, and are not so good, 

 in spite of their early appearance, as the deep blue 

 form sometimes known as var. Ingramii. This band 

 has been lengthened by a patch of that darker variety, 

 and in the end of February and onwards the two are 

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