Garden Airs and Graces 



splotched with black. But how came I by its 

 neighbor which is new to her? How well its deep 

 maroon tones down the brilliance of the others to 

 the purple lupin hoods below. Mahoney, is it? 

 It ought at least to be Prince Regent. For its 

 rebuke to gayety she would call it, John of Gaunt. 

 Or perhaps instead she stops before a group of 

 peonies. They came from my father's garden 

 and you might call old-fashioned, their rich, glow- 

 ing red. But was it art or accident, she asks me, 

 that placed beside them the perennial corn- 

 flowers that have caught the crimson just above 

 them in their shaggy disks? She professes, too, 

 that she would never dare to try her hand at my 

 long border where my courage lies in my re- 

 straint. Have I the faith to think that in all 

 those lavenders and pinks a magenta is not lurk- 

 ing, or that a hectic rose wiU never spread through 

 the cool pinks? All very well, now that I have 

 columbine to help me. It is a mediator despite its 

 spiu-s. Yet let the phlox once come into its own 

 and she will wager that I have a quarrel on my 

 hands. She has, however, a long pause for the 

 rising mist of garden heliotrope, for clumps of 

 [2Il] 



