248 MY GARDEN 



virginica, is too well known to need description. It is 

 quite worthy a place in the garden, and nothing is more 

 softly lovely for trailing over rough banks, rocks, or low 

 fences. All these sorts need no pruning save the re- 

 moval of overcrowded branches, or useless shoots, and 

 any good garden soil and a sunny situation inspires 

 them to do their best. 



Honeysuckles are endeared to us by long years of 

 companionship, by the wayside and in the garden. One 

 cannot imagine a garden without them, though Bacon, 

 in his well-known essay "Of Gardens," in giving a list of 

 plants proper for a garden, while including Honey- 

 suckles, adds, "so they be somewhat afar off." What 

 could there be in Honeysuckles, "ripened by the sun," 

 that one would not want right under one's nose? Truly 

 the great man had his idiosyncrasies! For all its 

 scrambling ways the Honeysuckle seems the most do- 

 mestic of vines to belong to cottage doorways, the 

 living-room windows, or the favourite corner of the 

 porch, and its delicious perfume, which Maeterlinck 

 called the "soul of dew," wafted to us in our country 

 walks and drives seems ever to proclaim a home. 



Hall's variety is a very good, almost evergreen 

 Honeysuckle, which blooms from June until freezing 

 weather and is a strong, rapid climber. Lonicera peri- 

 clymenum is a favourite variety, and its reddish, fra- 

 grant blossoms are freely produced. I have not found 

 that it grows quite so tall as Hall's but it is useful in 



