COLOUR IN MY GARDEN 



the soft wine tints, venous purple, pinky mauve, silver- 

 gray, smoky lavender sometimes touched with scarlet, or 

 flushed with heliotrope; and now, from the secret places 

 of the hybridists, comes the exciting rumour of a race of 

 blue Poppies — can it be true? Surely they will be the cool, 

 shadowy, changeful blues like those shown by Campanulas. 

 These would not seem strange, but a Poppy with the 

 colour of an Anchusa would somehow affect one as un- 

 pleasantly abnormal, like a green Carnation or the black 

 Tulip. Few flowers are more chaste and lovely than single 

 white Poppies; the Bride is a fine one, and Virginia is white 

 with a delicate pink edge. Poppies and Cornflowers make 

 a good association, for when the Poppies are spent they 

 may be pulled out and the Cornflowers left to continue on 

 their quaint blue way until frost. I once saw a bed of 

 silvery-lavender Poppies and Cornflowers that was very 

 pretty. 



The crepe-petalled Iceland Poppy (Papaver nudicaule) 

 that sows itself about my garden, springing up in the most 

 unlikely nooks and crevices, has much of the airy charm of 

 the annual sorts and decks itself in the loveliest colours: 

 apricot and orange, buff, scarlet and white. I had from an 

 English seedsman this spring a kind not too whimsically 

 named Pearls of Dawn, for a rosy glow underlies the soft 

 buffs and creams of its fragile petals. 



My favourite among perennial Poppies is P. rupifragum, 

 that in lieu of any proper English name I call the Spanish 

 Poppy.* It has all the whimsical appeal of its delicately 

 bold race and hoists its little snatches of gay colour on stems 



* P. rupifragum is a native of Spain. 



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