180 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



are offered us for trial. I am a thorough behever in novelties; 

 try a few new things each year is my earnest advice to those who 

 would consider the best advancement of their gardens. 



To return, after this too practical divergence, to the plantings 

 for color by months. June has to show a grouping of a beauty 

 altogether its own. Anchusa, the Dropmore variety of course, 

 with delphinium Cantab, backs the planting; White Canterbury 

 bells are near; the perennial campanula, a so-called blue, but 

 really a bluish-purple, comes into the group; the middle distance, 

 as it were, is filled by one of the clear deep rose pyrethrums ; while 

 their stems are in turn hidden by low masses of one of the grass 

 pinks covered with flowers which look confidingly upward toward 

 its loftier neighbors. 



A July planting in the border has seemed to give some special 

 pleasure. The simplest thing imaginable; common elder, perhaps 

 a dozen or so; possibly a hundred spikes of Lilium elegans; below 

 these again, gaillardia in the clearest tones obtainable, no belts 

 of color on the ray petals. 



Now comes August with its glorious phloxes from which to 

 choose. Pantheon, I think most lovely near Eryngium amethys- 

 tinum; Lord Rayleigh with heliotrope or ageratum Stella Gurnee 

 below, a lavender and rich purple scheme. To suggest: phlox 

 Lord Rayleigh with the fine lavenders near, Eugene Danzan- 

 villiers and Antonin Mercie; below these either a very deep purple 

 petunia, or verbena Dolores. The new pink phlox E. Campbell 

 will certainly prove a great acquisition for an August color scheme. 

 Mr. Wilbur Dubois of Madisonville, Ohio, one who knows, thus 

 describes it: "A soft fresh bright pink, with red eye; in mass 

 the eye is rather a negligible feature, not conveying a pronounced 

 impression as if it were a distinctive trait of the flower." We 

 hear little of that old variety of phlox Aurore Boreale, but its 

 unusual height, its rich salmon tones, not in the least affected by 

 the somewhat carmine eye of each floret, makes it one of the great 

 August stand-bys. The great point about phloxes is their relia- 

 bility. Who shall say that flowers have no personality when we 

 consider the novel habit of this flower, the certainty of its bloom 

 at a given chite, its freedom from disease, and its marvelous quali- 

 ties of resistance to frost and heat, drought and flood. My ad- 



