THE ROSE OF ENGLAND 



WE go out into our gardens and sow seeds or transplant 

 plants or watch green tips of herbaceous things top the soil, 

 or pick our first snowdrops in February if not in January. 

 The garden is still a pleasant place of flowers and life, it 

 may be, even in November, if frosts have spared the dahlias 

 and damp the chrysanthemums. So many things are now 

 'perpetual' that it is difficult to say which is the proper 

 month of each flower. If we adopted the custom of the 

 North American Indians, who called each month by the 

 name of its properest plant so June was the Moon of straw- 

 berries we should be rebuked for a series of months by 

 finding bits of June astray in November. Not many flowers 

 are more perpetual, even those not christened with that 

 blessed word, than roses, once taken as the very symbol of 

 brevity. As the petals have multiplied and the colours 

 extended and the characters commingled, the life has been 

 prolonged. Not only 'Christmas roses' bloom at Christ- 

 mas ; and in a garden you may have plenty flowers of ' the 

 short-lived rose,' from the blooming of the Banksia, it may 

 be even as early as March, to November or December 

 blooms of Frau Karl Druschki or Gruss an Teplitz and the 

 old Blush Monthly. 



