IO2 



APRIL 



flower. Putting out leaves to maintain existence is one 

 thing. The efflorescence is quite another. Our own 

 home plants and shrubs can do much with little encour 

 agement. They are grateful for small grains of sunlight 

 and are rarely acquisitive of its gold. The darkest or 

 coldest summer fills the woods of next spring with pleni 

 tude of primrose, anemone, and bluebell. The constella 

 tions of the stitchwort as surely and regularly decorate 

 the hedgerows as the Milky Way the heavens. Weather 

 is no matter to them. Every March blooms the whins, 

 and no year is recorded when a Linnaeus might not be 

 tempted to fall on his knees and thank God for such 

 hillsides of splendour. Our commons have no lean 

 years ; but are rich at every due season with thyme and 

 harebell and bedstraw and avens and ling. If there is 

 not a blackthorn winter there is a blackthorn spring, and 

 the hawthorn spreads its rich incense in the dale with the 

 regularity of a priestly office. 



It is not so with the alien or even the half alien ; as 

 every gardener and every orchard keeper knows. Each 

 year they record the tally of the previous summer. The 

 plant that gives, perhaps, the surest index of all is the 

 earliest of all, that soft mauve darling of the South, which 

 we call iris stylosa. It was a wide and general experience 

 of the spring of 1934 that it flowered with a glory and 

 profusion seldom, if ever, before recorded by younger 

 gardeners. We have pampered it with a warm and sunny 

 shelter under a heated greenhouse and fed it with the po 

 verty of soil that is one of its luxuries ; but we have been 

 lucky to wheedle a sparse blossom or two, that needed 

 search among the bundle of concealing leaves. That year, 

 even on less congenial sites, we could cut the blossom in 

 sheaves, and they augmented in steady gradation through 

 several months of the year : the single sprig of January 



