104 MY GARDEN 



Fig Leaved Hollyhock. This plant is slender in growth 

 and sends up lateral stalks which keep it in bloom all 

 summer long. 



Next to Hollyhocks, or quite equal to them in pictu- 

 resque value, save that they have not the wide colour 

 range, are the radiant Mulleins. Every one knows the 

 noble outline of the wild Mullein, Verbascum Thapsus, 

 and also its bad habit of opening but a few of its blos- 

 soms at a time. The foreign and hybrid Mulleins have 

 the same splendid form and clothe their great cande- 

 labra-like stalks in solid bloom which continues to de- 

 velop during the greater part of the summer. Mulleins 

 are friends of only about four years' standing, but to no 

 other flower am I more grateful for fine and lasting effect. 

 Their soft yellow colour is so sunshiny as to really seem 

 to cast a radiance and is so non-combative as to affiliate 

 well with almost any other colour. The splendid V. 

 Olympicum was the first I knew. It is, like most of the 

 others, biennial in character and grows seven feet high. 

 V. phlomoides is as splendid and as tall, and V. pannosum 

 has woolly leaves and grows about five feet high. V. 

 phoeniceum is a low-growing sort, two feet, sending up 

 from a flat rosette of leaves a spike set with flowers of 

 rose or purple or white, but this sort seems to me much 

 less worthy than the others. V. nigrum has yellow 

 flowers marked with purple and grows four feet tall; 

 there is a white variety of this. 



Of late years a number of good hybrids have been 



