AUGUST 185 



grand dame of fashion prepares for the opera 

 or for a ball. The evening primrose is one 

 of the most interesting of American plants, 

 and white and yellow four-o'clocks are most 

 satisfactory. White petunias are at their best 

 after the shadows begin to fall, a certain 

 plebeian quality innate to the flower vanishing 

 with daylight. "A candlelight beauty" was 

 the phrase once used to describe a woman 

 whose charms were beginning to fade, and it 

 is not a bad one to use with respect to the 

 petunia. There are, it is most true, many 

 other white flowers which are almost more 

 lovely in the soft, silvery moonlight than in 

 the full noontide, but they do not belong to 

 August. 



If, after all this special pleading, the August 

 gardener cannot be content without colour, 

 there is a full palette for him to choose from. 

 It is the fashion to decry the so-called " foliage 

 plants," for which I have a small liking myself. 

 Yet, why? The yellow-leaved things always 

 suggest decay, it is true, and the parti-coloured 

 ones blight, and the spotted-leaved ones 

 various insects or unwholesome soil ; but 

 there are white, woolly-leaved centaureas, 



