the Dutch, because they bloom at the time of the herring harvest — six 

 and seven feet high, and with them the Monkshood, with its tall spikes 

 of hooded bloom. In poorer soils or with worse culture these fine 

 flowers are of much lower growth, the Monkshood often only half the 

 height, with its deeply-cut leaves yellowing before their time with the 

 weakness of too-early maturity. The pleasure with which one sees this 

 fine old garden flower is, however, always a little lessened by the 

 knowledge of the dangerously poisonous nature of the whole plant, and 

 especially of the root. It is the deadly Aconite of pharmacy. Another 

 of the same family is grouped with it ; the yellow Aconite of the 

 Austrian mountains, with branched heads of sulphur-coloured bloom and 

 singularly handsome leaves — large, dark green, glistening and persistently 

 enduring — for, long after the bloom is past, they are beautiful in the 

 border. 



How well an artist knows the value of grey-leaved plants, and their 

 use in pictorial gardening in the way of giving colour-value by close 

 companionship, to tender pinks and lilacs, and, above all, to whites ! A 

 patch of white bloom is often too hard and sudden and inharmonious to 

 satisfy the trained eye, but led up to and softened and sweetened by 

 masses of neighbouring tender grey it takes its proper place and comes 

 to its right strength in the well-ordered scheme. Lavender, Lavender- 

 cotton {Santolina), Catmint, Pinks and Carnations, and the Woolly 

 Woundwort {Stachys) with some other plants of hoary foliage, do this 

 good work. In this garden the Woundwort, there known by its old 

 Midland name of " Our Saviour's Blanket," throws up its grey-pink 

 heads of bloom from a thick carpet of rather large leaves, silvery soft 

 with their thick coating of long white down. Here a groundwork of it 

 leads to the group of white Peach-leaved Bell-flower on the right and to 

 the tall white Gnaphalium, a plant of kindred woolliness, on the left, 

 while the precious grey quality runs through the left-hand flower-group 

 by means of the downy-coated pods of the earlier-blooming Lupins, 

 purposely left among the later flowers for this and for their handsome 

 form. 



How finely the Orange Lilies tell against the background of the 

 holly hedge, at the path-end cut into an arbour, may well be seen in 



59 



