birds are waking up, and but for them the world is still, and the Cluster- 

 Roses are opening their buds. No one can know the whole beauty of a 

 Cluster-Rose who has not seen it when the summer day is quite young ; 

 when the buds of such a rose as the Garland have just burst open and 

 the sun has not yet bleached their wonderful tints of shell-pink and 

 tenderest shell-yellow into their only a little less beautiful colouring of 

 full midday. 



By July there are still more of our tall garden flowers ; the stately 

 Delphiniums, seven, eight, and nine feet high ; tall white Lilies ; the 

 tall yellow Meadow-Rues, Hollyhocks, and Sweet Peas in plenty. 



By August we are in autumn ; and it is the month of the tall 

 Phloxes. There are some who dislike the sweet, faint and yet strong 

 scent of these flowers ; to me it is one of the delights of the flower 

 year. 



No garden flower has been more improved of late years ; a whole 

 new range of excellent and brilliant colouring has been developed. I 

 can remember when the only Phloxes were a white and a poor Lilac ; 

 the individual flowers were small and starry and set rather widely apart. 

 They were straggly-looking things, though always with the welcome 

 sweet scent. Nowadays we all know the beauty of these fine flowers ; 

 the large size of the massive heads and of the individual blooms ; the 

 pure whites, the good Lilacs and Pinks, and that most desirable range of 

 salmon-rose colourings, of which one of the first that made a lively stir in 

 the world of horticulture was the one called Lothair. In its own 

 colouring of tender salmon-rose it is still one of the best. Careful seed- 

 saving among the brighter flowers of this colouring led to the tints 

 tending towards scarlet, among which Etna was a distinct advance, to be 

 followed, a year or two later, by the all-conquering Coquelicot. Some 

 florists have also pushed this docile flower into a range of colouring which 

 is highly distasteful to the trained colour-eye of the educated amateur ; a 

 series of rank purples and virulent magentas ; but these can be avoided. 

 What is now most wanted, and seems to be coming, is a range of tender, 

 rather light Pinks, that shall have no trace of the rank quality that seems 

 so unwilling to leave the Phloxes of this colouring. 



Garden Phloxes were originally hybrids of two or three North 

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