FLOWER POSSIBILITIES 211 



very beautiful and popular flowers that are quite 

 without attractive fragrance. There is no line 

 of experimental work with flowers that should be 

 more attractive to the amateur than the develop- 

 ment of fragrant varieties of some of these odor- 

 less flowers. 



And fortunately it is an undertaking that may 

 be expected to produce very satisfactory results 

 as immediate, as striking, and as valuable re- 

 sults as from any other plant experiment. In 

 any group of odorless flowers you may have the 

 good fortune to detect, if you search carefully 

 enough, one that differs from its fellows in hav- 

 ing at least a suggestion of fragrance. And if 

 you will work in the right way with this individ- 

 ual, you will be able to produce a race of per- 

 fumed flowers, thus adding the finishing touch 

 to a blossom which, however attractive otherwise, 

 could not be considered perfect so long as it 

 lacked this finishing quality. 



In an earlier volume we have heard the story 

 of the fragrant calla. 



The reader will recall that this anomalous 

 variety, known now as the Fragrance, was de- 

 veloped by simple selection, along the lines just 

 illustrated in the case of the Heuchera, with the 

 difference merely that the characteristic borne 

 constantly in mind was fragrance of the calla 



