My Rock Garden 



Look at Allium paradoxum on your left : the little 

 transparent yellowish bulbils struck here and there among 

 the flowers look like Mistletoe berries. Spirea Thunbergii 

 at the opposite corner has been flowering ever since 

 Christmas, and is still full of blossom. It has grown into 

 a fine specimen, I believe chiefly due to the fact that I 

 give it a good clearing out of old wood each season just 

 after flowering. Did you catch a whiff of an unpleasant 

 smell like fish frying ? I often wondered how it was 

 possible to smell kitchen operations down here so far 

 from any house until I discovered it was the scent of 

 Cotoneaster multiflora, the umbrella-shaped specimen 

 growing on the top of the high mound. It is something 

 like the scent of Hawthorn, but much more unpleasant. 

 The tree is graceful, though, and of course the scent passes 

 away with the flowers, and they atone for their wickedness 

 by turning to good red berries in autumn. Among these 

 large cordate leaves you can find the weird blossoms of 

 Asarum Bealei, livid red with three tails, each one of 

 which is nearly three inches long, and close beside it 

 grows A. grandiflorum with very similar flowers, both of 

 them so uncanny and evil-looking that they would make 

 a suitable button-hole for the Devil. Claytonia siberica, 

 both pink and white, seeds about freely in this semi-shady 

 corner, and is comely and welcome now, but later on it 

 becomes aggressive, sprawls out in a chickweedy way that 

 proclaims its rather plebeian lineage, and reminds us of its 

 poor relation C. perfoliata, whose only beauty is the green 

 carpet it provides in hopelessly shady places during the 

 winter months. 



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