Round the Year in the Garden 



various markings, while oculatus is purplish rose marked 

 with black and yellow. 



The Blue Camassia. How rarely outside botanic 

 gardens does one see the beautiful Camassia or Quamash 

 from North America, yet this is among the finest of early 

 summer bulbs. One of the illustrations gives a good idea 

 of Camassia Leichtlini, which grows about 3 feet high and 

 bears numerous starry cream-coloured flowers. Others 

 are esculenta, blue, and Cusickii, lavender blue. One has 

 only to plant the bulbs about 5 inches deep in ordinary 

 well tilled soil in October, either in a sunny or partially 

 shaded spot ; they may be left undisturbed for years. It 

 is scarcely advisable to put them in the flower border, 

 because their large leaves are rather untidy, and it is not 

 an easy matter to hide them. 



Lily of the Valley is so familiar and so widely planted 

 that one would think there was nothing more to be said 

 about it. But I have an interesting tale to tell. I re- 

 member on one occasion advising a reader of some notes 

 of mine to take up and replant some crowded Lilies of 

 the Valley, of which the flower spikes decreased in length 

 and the flower bells in size each year. I was immediately 

 taken to task by another correspondent, who related that 

 her own garden contained a splendid and very old bed 

 of Lily of the Valley. One day a professional gardener 

 who happened to see them said that the roots were much 

 too crowded, and advised their being taken up and re- 

 planted. Since then, she averred, scarcely a flower had 

 appeared, and she believed it would be years before the 

 bed regained its former beauty. The moral of this is 

 that if your Lily of the Valley bed is flourishing, leave 

 it alone. One of my happiest recollections is of a Lily 

 of the Valley bed in a western county; it flanked both 

 sides of a walk in the kitchen garden. The plants were 

 as thick as Peas in a pod, yet they flowered profusely. I 

 was assured that they had not been disturbed for twenty 

 years, yet they showed no sign of deterioration. There 



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