THE VAKIABILITY IN CULTIVATION OF HARDY FLOWERING PLANTS. 221 



of pure white, even so far from gardens as to be beyond sus- 

 picion of cultivated pollen. Again, of those native plants which 

 may be said to have ornamental flowers, I think I have found 

 white-flowered varieties growing wild of nearly one-third ; and 

 I have even seen wild varieties of every shade between white 

 and the typical colour. Near Llandudno is a limestone hill on 

 which Veronica spicata grows in abundance. I never found 

 more than one plant there with white flowers, but every shade 

 of purple and pink may be picked out. In some lanes in Cheshire 

 I have seen the colours of Campanula rotundifolia vary nearly 

 as much. Now if cultivation of itself encouraged this change 

 of colour, we should find a greater tendency than we do find 

 both to call into play the power which nature has of varying the 

 colour where we have planted only one colour, and also a greater 

 tendency to revert from an abnormal colour to that of the type. 

 Here are a few facts bearing on this subject. 



Twenty years ago I planted in my garden in Cheshire a 

 white-flowered Musk Mallow, accidentally found by the roadside. 

 This plant sowed its own seeds, and amongst thousands of seed- 

 lings which flowered in the next ten years all had white flowers. 

 I then introduced a plant of the same species with the normal 

 pink flowers, and, though I soon expelled it again, I had to weed 

 out pink seedlings from white for several years. I had just the 

 same experience of the white variety of the biennial Moth Mullein 

 {Verbascum Blattaria), which I raised from the seed of a wild 

 plant ; it gradually grew in all parts of my garden, and was for 

 several years quite constant, until I introduced one of the yellow- 

 flowered type. Geranium Bobertianum has afforded another 

 example of constancy to colour ; a plant of it with white flowers 

 found on a wall at Matlock has filled my garden with its seed- 

 lings, but I cannot find one amongst them of the typical colour, 

 though the type abounds in the woods close by. But some plants 

 revert at once to their normal colour from seed, if I try to 

 establish a white variety. The common white Harebell rarely 

 gives me a white seedling. The white Foxglove, if grown in isola- 

 tion, can be trusted to be constant. I raise it year after year from 

 bought seed, and it comes true ; but of seed saved in my garden 

 from white plants, where the purple type is common in the 

 neighbourhood, not five per cent, come white. The Welsh 

 Poppy (Meconopsis cambrica) has grown abundantly in my 



