COLOUR IN MY GARDEN 



These midseason Phloxes are extremely useful, for they 

 come at that period which is the most difficult to gardeners — 

 late June and early July. Very gay and striking is a mass 

 of Miss Lingard interplanted with Pentstemon barbatus, 

 whose graceful stalks hung with scarlet bells curve grace- 

 fully above the Phlox. Lovely, too, is this white Phlox 

 planted behind lavender Erigeron speciosus — a splendid 

 new form of this plant is Quakeress — with some Lyme Grass 

 and tufts of the little blue Fescue Grass (Festuca glauca) 

 at the edge of the border. The mallow-pink Phloxes are 

 charming with the gray-leaved Mullein Pinks — both the 

 white and the rich aster-purple sorts with little clouds of 

 Gypsophila between. 



Early August is the festal season of the decussata Phloxes. 

 They are perhaps the very best of hardy plants, seeming to 

 embody all the qualities desirable in a plant — hardiness, 

 upright carriage, fine foliage, beautiful and various colours, 

 fragrance, and immunity from disease. And yet, fine as 

 they are, I think the average garden, my own included, is 

 too much given up to them at the season of their blooming. 

 Especially are we apt to have too many of the pink and 

 scarlet sorts which, in such generous masses as we are used 

 to plant them, do certainly produce a cloying effect — like 

 too many sweets. Freer use of the violet and lavender sorts, 

 which are many and fine, would go a long way toward 

 remedying this fault. The reason that these are not more 

 freely made use of is, I believe, because of the very mis- 

 leading descriptions given of them in the catalogues. 

 Phloxes are under suspicion, for the magenta principle is 

 never more than a generation or two back, and we have 



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