VIII. 



RHUBARB SPROUTS. 



THE beds of the kitchen garden at the present mo- 

 ment unintentionally afford an admirable illustration of 

 the main principle upon which most natural coloring 

 seems to depend. In their really beautiful display of 

 bright and gracefully graduated tints they supply us with 

 a picture which, but for its familiar utilitarian character, 

 everybody would stop to observe and admire. There 

 are long sticks of rhubarb, ruddy crimson below, and 

 merging through delicate gradations of pink and white 

 into the golden yellow of the cramped and etiolated 

 leaves above. There is sea-kale, blanched in the stem, 

 and unfolding at the blade into crinkled shoots of an in- 

 describable but very dainty pale mauve or violet. There 

 are beet-roots, sprouting with dark Tyrian-red leaves, 

 whose purplish veins persist even in the greening later 

 foliage. Almost every one of the spring plants has 

 more or less of these bright hues, marking them off at 

 once from the common green of full-blown summer 

 leaves. Even on the asparagus one may observe a set of 

 little bluish scales ; while the young tufts upon the 

 carrots are pale yellow or golden brown. The reason 

 throughout is a very simple one : all these spring vegeta- 

 bles are perennials grown from a permanent root-stock ; 

 and in some cases they have been more or less blanched, 

 naturally or artificially, by growing underneath a loose 

 mass of heaped-up earth. If one looks into the flower- 

 garden, one sees the same thing in the sprouting peonies, 



