The Flowers of Early Spring 



majority of people seem to appreciate the value 

 and beauty of green foliage, especially in winter. 

 In some gardens it is the custom to fill the empty 

 beds, which were in summer given to bedding 

 plants, with small evergreen shrubs. The effect 

 is seldom satisfactory ; the poor little things can- 

 not throw off the miserable appearance which 

 marks them as the damnosa hereditas of summer 

 bedding, and they can give no pleasure to any 

 true lover of plants. But there are many 

 perennial plants which will clothe the surface of 

 the ground as well in winter as in summer, and 

 can be allowed to occupy the ground the whole 

 year without injuring any plants that the gardener 

 may wish to use for the summer decoration of his 

 garden. The hardy cyclamens are most useful in 

 this way. The Neapolitan cyclamen flowers in 

 late autumn, and is at once furnished with most 

 beautiful large mottled leaves, which lie flat on 

 the ground, and remain in full beauty till April or 

 May. The C. Coum forms its leaves a little later, 

 and before the flowers, but it, too, forms a beautiful 

 carpet of close-lying foliage, and, where the soil is 

 favourable, they will increase rapidly, and may be 

 let alone for years. I have some large patches 

 which I know to have been over eighty years in 

 the same place, and they seem to me to increase 

 in beauty every year, and there are few plants 

 which multiply themselves so readily by seed. 

 The stalk, immediately after flowering, twists 

 itself and bends towards the ground, in which the 



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