260 Old Time Gardens 



ing the Hepatica Squirrelcups (a name I never 

 heard given them elsewhere), says they form " a 

 graceful company hiding in their bells a soft aerial 

 blue." Of course, they vary through blue and 

 pinky purple, but the blue is well hidden, and I 

 never think of them save as an almost white flower. 

 Nor are the Violets as lovely on the meadow and 

 field slopes, as the mild Innocence, the Houstonia, 

 called also Bluets, which is scarcely a distinctly blue 

 expanse, but rather "a milky way of minute stars." 

 An English botanist denies that it is blue at all. A 

 field covered with Innocence always looks to me as 

 if little clouds and puffs of blue-white smoke had 

 descended and rested on the grass. 



I well recall when the Aquilegia, under the name 

 of California Columbine, entered my mother's gar- 

 den, to which its sister, the red and yellow Colum- 

 bine, had been brought from a rocky New England 

 pasture when the garden was new. This Aquilegia 

 came to us about the year 1870. I presume old 

 catalogues of American florists would give details 

 and dates of the journey of the plant from the Pa- 

 cific to the Atlantic. It chanced that this first Aqui- 

 legia of my acquaintance was of a distinct light blue 

 tint ; and it grew apace and thrived and was vastly 

 admired, and filled the border with blueness of 

 that singular tint seen of late years in its fullest 

 extent and most prominent position in the great 

 masses of bloom of the blue Hydrangea, the show 

 plant of such splendid summer homes as may be 

 found at Newport. These blue Hydrangeas are 

 ever to me a color blot. They accord with no other 



