Tulips 



and cold hail-showers of last April bruised and worried 

 them, and large patches of decay began to show themselves, 

 and then the dreadful ravages of the disease that Tulip- 

 growers call " fire " spread through the bed, and ate into 

 the flower-stems, and robbed us of the fine effect we had 

 enjoyed the season before. Another bed of Gesneriana 

 follows Laurentia, and then one of elegans alba, one of the 

 most lovely of Spring flowers. I love the pointed shape 

 of this and its sisters, elegans, fulgens, and retroflexa. 

 They have been named as though they were wild specific 

 forms, but I was told by a Dutch grower that he had 

 spoken to an old man who remembered the first appear- 

 ance of all four of them in one seed-bed in Holland. 

 It is supposed that they are crosses between T. acuminata 

 and some other form of Gesneriana, the pointed reflexing 

 character of the flowers coming from acuminata, which 

 from its curious, long, slender segments has gained the 

 name of the Chinese Tulip I imagine because they suggest 

 the finger-nails of a mandarin. Elegans alba is much more 

 like a white form of fulgens than of elegans in its greater 

 height, later time of flowering, and less recurved segments. 

 These are pure white, beautifully edged with the finest 

 imaginable wire-edge line of crimson. It is very effective 

 in this bed, but equally good for planting in borders among 

 herbaceous plants. The last of the Terrace beds has for 

 many years been filled with the white-eyed Gesneriana that 

 has two names, Gesneriana albo oculata and Rosalind. It 

 is rather later than the others on the Terrace, and I must 

 confess of too blue a rose colour to go anywhere but at 

 the end, and I expect you can guess that the white bed 

 is placed next to it on purpose to cut it off from the 

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