COLOR IN THE FLOWER GARDEN 173 



Iris reticulata of four inches; the last of the lovely guests is the 

 great white English iris of four feet; and those who have shown 

 themselves between the opening and closing days of iris time are 

 of many nations, German, Japanese, Siberian, English, and Dutch. 



Tulips, so highly developed in our day, present a wonderful 

 field of color from which to choose; so does the dahlia tribe. It is 

 easy to see that the glaring faults in color planting in our gardens 

 are not due to lack of good material. 



The question of absolute color is a very nice question indeed, 

 and reminds one of the old proverb of one man's meat being 

 another man's poison. We cannot say that a given color is ugly. 

 Its beauty or lack of beauty depends upon its relation to other 

 colors. To say that one dislikes mauve is not to prove mauve 

 unbeautif ul. Most of us who have prejudices against a certain color 

 would be amazed at the effect upon our color sense of the offensive 

 hue when judiciously used with correlated tones. For instance, 

 what commoner than to hear this exclamation as one wanders 

 in an August garden where a clump of tall phloxes have reverted 

 to the magenta, despised of most of us, and where the hostess's 

 shears have been spared to the spoiling of the garden: " What a 

 horrible color has that phlox taken on," but, take that same group 

 of flowering stems another year, back it by the pale spires of 

 Physostegia virginica rosea, see that phlox Lord Rayleigh blooms 

 beside it, a good lavender like Antonin Mercie is hard by, let some 

 masses of rich purple petunia have their will below, with perhaps 

 the flat panicles of large-flowered white verbena, a few spikes of 

 gladiolus Baron Hulot, and some trusses of a pinkish laven- 

 der heliotrope judiciously disposed, and lo! the ugliness of the 

 magenta phlox has been transmuted into a positive beauty. It 

 has become an active agent toward the loveliness of the whole 

 picture. 



What a lucky thing for us delvers into plant and seed lists if 

 the color tests of railways, on a more elaborate and delicate scale, 

 to be sure, could be applied to the eyes of the writers of color de- 

 scriptions for these publications. The only available guide to the 

 absolute color of flowers of which I happen to know is 

 the " Repertoire des Couleurs ", published by the Chrysanthemum 

 Society of France. Of this there is soon to be published a pocket 



