Beautiful Flowering Shrubs 



The pretty sterile florets, that make up the great 

 rounded bloom, consist of four coloured sepals and 

 nothing else, except perhaps the merest rudiments of 

 other organs, and the blooms are often borne in great 

 profusion ; indeed, in a certain case, two adjacent plants 

 were together credited with no fewer than^925 of them. 

 Normally the colour is pink, but the tint varies, and 

 blue blooms, often much sought after, can be induced 

 in various ways, such as by watering the shrub twice 

 weekly with a solution of ammonium alum, or by mix- 

 ing iron filings or slate chippings with the soil, or even 

 by laying the mowing of lawns round the roots. A 

 shrub with blooms of a rich rose colour transferred to 

 a soil much more strongly ferruginous has been known 

 to change their colour to a beautiful porcelain blue. 

 But it is difficult to explain why, as sometimes happens, 

 the same plant should produce both pink and blue 

 bloom at the same time, though a not very adequate 

 suggestion has been made that the tint depends upon 

 the intensity of the light, shade producing a tendency 

 to blueness. The fact that a shrub will bear blue 

 flowers one year and pink the next, and vice versa is 

 more readily attributable to variation in the soil. 



There are, of course, no fruits produced by these 

 sterile florets. 



In a Japanese variety of this species viz : H. hortensis 



Mariesii, so called because it was discovered by Charles 



228 



