APEIL 91 



One question must occur to everybody who visits 

 this wilderness How comes it, seeing there is such 

 abundant variety to choose from, that most gardens 

 and shrubberies present such monotony in their 

 furnishing? Here is one plant, for instance, Daphne 

 Blagayana, covered with ivory-white rosettes of 

 exquisite fragrance, evergreen, shapely, and withal as 

 hardy as a box-bush, which one would expect to be a 

 general favourite, yet you shall look for it in vain in 

 ninety-nine hundred gardens out of a thousand. How 

 many ladies who really take pains about their borders 

 are acquainted with the lovely little ground - laurel 

 (Epigcea repens), the chosen badge of Nova Scotia, or 

 the quaint, oak-leaved avens (Dryas octopetala), sheet- 

 ing the banks with dark-green foliage and gay white 

 flowers? The Canadian 'puccoon' or blood-root 

 (Sanguinaria canadensis) far exceeds the snowdrop 

 in lustrous white, and is quite as easily naturalised ; 

 while for matchless blue consider the Himalayan 

 Tecophikea cyanocrocus. 



XL 



It is impossible for any sober citizen to write or read 

 about gardening without breaking his shins over the 

 preposterous polysyllables in use to designate Barbarous 

 those plants which have not acquired popular plant names 

 English names. Generic and specific terms are 

 necessary, of course, for scientific classification; and 

 Latin, even as pronounced in this, as in no other land, 

 is unrivalled as a medium combining elegance and pre- 



