WATERSIDE WEEDS. 171 



neighborhood of running water, where its little thickset 

 bushes rise to a height of two or three feet only, and its 

 clusters of tiny nuts, dotted with little balls of resin 

 like beads of amber, overhang the petty brink with their 

 fragrant bunches. Crush the shiny foliage between 

 your fingers, and it yields at once a grateful country per- 

 fume, redolent of the wholesome resin in its dotted 

 leaves. Here, too, are tall bur-reeds, with their globu- 

 lar heads of greenish flowers ; and here are great grace- 

 ful white-blossomed arrowheads ; and here are the loll- 

 ing heart-shaped leaves of the floating pond-weed ; and 

 here again are the tall black reeds, looking like natural 

 maces, with their thick black heads and their waving 

 summit of ragged fluffy cotton, standing sentinel in long 

 rows over the shorter vegetation in their shadow beneath. 

 The truth is, our ordinary taste in the matter of flow- 

 ers, and especially of wild flowers, is still a trifle bar- 

 baric. The first thing that strikes children or savages in 

 flowers is their brightly-colored petals ; they care little 

 for beauty of shape in blossoms, for gracefulness and del- 

 icacy of outline in foliage, for the glossy leaves of the 

 holly or the hartstongue, for the infinite variety that 

 custom cannot stale in the crisped and wrinkled fronds 

 of ferns. When they pick a nosegay, it is all bright 

 blossoms without a touch of relieving verdure ; the 

 only thing they care for is the crude staring red and blue 

 of the largest petals. Accordingly, all the earliest 

 flowers to be selected for cultivation were the biggest 

 and brightest in hue: the roses, peonies, sunflowers, 

 and hollyhocks. It is only very lately that we have 

 begun also to choose some plants for their foliage or their 

 general effect ; to grow purple-leaved coleuses, quaintly 

 lop-sided begonias, and crimson -hearted caladiums in our 

 greenhouses ; to pleach out pampas-grass, and weeping 



