^ The Scents of Early Summer $£ 



they can be had without any forcing at all in full flower 

 by the end of April. A * bank ' of them in mixed colours 

 is a glorious sight. Mr. Wall, who had such a wonderful 

 show of them in full flower at the R.H.S. Show, told me 

 that the plants were lifted in January and some of them 

 brought into a temperature of 45 ° (this is the highest 

 they will stand), and then put into quite cold green- 

 houses. His show was a joy to behold. Of columbines it is, 

 alas ! as true to-day as it was three hundred years ago, when 

 Parkinson wrote : * Columbines are flowers of that re- 

 spect as that no Garden would willingly be without 

 them, that could tell how to have them, yet the rarer the 

 flowers are, the more trouble to keepe ; the ordinary 

 sorts on the contrary part will not be lost, doe what one 

 will.' 



Few people grow the old-fashioned scented sweet peas 

 although at least one of the leading firms lists them. 

 Sweet peas and mignonette were a favourite mixture for 

 indoor decoration in Victorian days. Mignonette (a 

 native of Egypt) is only a comparatively old-fashioned 

 flower in our gardens, for it was not introduced till the 

 middle of the eighteenth century. According to the 

 Flora Historica — * By a manuscript note in the library 

 of the late Sir Joseph Banks, it appears that the seed of 

 the mignonette was sent in 1742 by Lord Bateman from 

 the Royal Garden at Paris to Mr. Richard Bateman at 

 Old Windsor ; but we should presume that this seed was 

 not dispersed, and perhaps not cultivated beyond Mr. 

 Bateman's garden, as we find that Mr. Miller received 

 the seed from Dr. Adrian van Rozen of Leyden, and 

 cultivated it in the Botanic Garden at Chelsea in the 

 year 1752. From Chelsea it soon got into the gardens 



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