96 
The Garden Magazine, October, 1920 
Yarrow. It does remind one at a little distance of Tansy, 
though its color is brighter and better and its corymbs quite 
different in form. For some reason, 1 do not often see it, 
with its deeply cut foliage, in the gardens of my friends. It is 
an easy perennial, but ought to be transplanted either every 
year or at most every two years, as it crowds itself out of 
comfortable habitation. 1 have it in one of the oblong beds 
which yet disgrace the centre garden at Breeze Hill. 
So soon as my nerve and pocket-book reach an understanding, 
all of these beds will disappear into widened borders, in which 
this good Achillea. will find a satisfactory and more appropriate 
place than it now has, though 1 must confess that the juxta- 
position in which it bloomed this summer is not bad, flanked 
to the east by a great mass of Hemerocallis fulva, and to the 
west by as great a mass of Heliopsis Pitcheriana. 
By the way, 1 have discovered how to handle the other 
Achillea above mentioned, known familiarly as The Pearl. 
This is one of the perennials that proceeds to absorb an entire 
vicinity, to slop over on the grass walks, and to do the other 
things which make it hard to endure, even though its fine white 
flowers are freely produced and are among the best of all flowers 
for cutting. This year 1 dug every atom of it out of one of those 
same oblong beds to which 1 have disparagingly referred, long 
after it had started growth. It was cut up into little clumps 
about the size of my two fists, sheared off to the ground, and re- 
planted a little more than a foot apart in a rather dry and 
troublesome location. It is now thanking me for this treatment 
by a mass of lovely white blooms, larger and better and with 
accessible stems. 
The Better Astilbes 
D URING the last week in June and the first two weeks in 
July, Breeze Hill has in various parts a showing of the 
better Astilbes which is distinctly pleasing. Most garden folks 
and more cut-flower buyers and spring-plant buyers know 
Astilbe japonica, miscalled Spirea japonica. But the Astilbe 
hybrids produced a few years before the war by George Arends, 
the cunning German hybridizer, do not resemble either japonica, 
one parent, or Davidii, an- 
other parent, to any appreci- 
able extent. It is these, in 
some ten named varieties, that 
I call the better Astilbes. 
In general the habit of these 
plants is more robust than that 
of the familiar Astilbe jap- 
onica. The catalogues speak 
of some of the sorts running to 
four or five feet in height to 
the tip of the bloom spike, but 
1 have not had any reach that 
height. The colors range from 
white through good pink shades 
to a deep pink which is nearly 
magenta, but not meanly ma- 
genta. One or two have a dis- 
tinctly salmon tint which is 
most agreeable. All of them 
grow freely, particularly in a 
semi -shaded spot, and will 
seemingly endure much shade, 
though the flowers will be paler 
and smaller in such a location. 
They are obviously better with 
plenty of water, particularly 
in the growing time. Divid- 
ing them this spring rather brutally, cutting each clump into 
two, three, or four smaller clumps, seemingly only increased the 
desire of the plant to be “among those present” in the garden 
with bloom and beauty. In this endurance of transplanting 
it is like other close-knit, fibrous-rooted plants, 1 presume. 
The general class of these Astilbes is known as the Arendsii 
hybrids. Nurserymen seem scarcely awake to them, though 
Bailey’s “ Cyclopedia” tells a good story about them. In that 
indispensable reference work, these hybrids are collectively 
called Astilbe rubella and Mr. Rehder, who wrote the section, 
refers them mostly to Lemoinei (which itself is a hybrid, of 
course), Chinensis, rutilans, carminea, etc., though he admits 
that they are properly called in the trade “under the collective 
name of A. Arendsii.” Whatever their name may be the 
plants themselves are exceedingly desirable subjects, worthy of 
much more extensive use. Why do not some of the herbaceous 
plant nurserymen wake up to them? 
The Blue-leaved Honeysuckle 
I T WAS in the spring of 1913 that there came to Breeze Hill 
some eighty little plants selected at the Arnold Arboretum for 
me by E. H. Wilson. With the genera of most of these plants 
I had a reading acquaintance, but the species’ names were all 
unfamiliar. I located various of them according to my “ hunch ” 
as to where they might prosper; but I had no guess whatever in 
relation to about twenty-five, which were consequently planted 
in one group, called for awhile “ the Arboretum bed.” This bed 
proved somewhat of a joke on me, by reason of the contiguities 
innocently established. A creeping Lonicera — 1 didn’t know 
it could only crawl! — was neighbored with another Lonicera, 
similar enough as to the little original plant, but rapidly reaching 
up and out until I removed it this spring at twelve feet across 
and ten feet high in order to keep room to breathe! 
Another of these plants — again a Lonicera — I moved at the 
end of two years to a six-foot border just inside a hedge of 
Berberis Thunbergii (which was planted to grow to three feet 
and has given no sign of stopping at five). The Lonicera is 
quite able to maintain itself against the hungry thready yellow 
roots of the Barberry, however, and has had to be cut back 
several times. And what a beatuy it is! I have written of it 
once before in the Garden Magazine, before it had attained 
the proportions of the present. Now 1 again call attention to 
it, because of its sheer loveli- 
ness all the growing season, to 
say nothing of the elegance of 
its bloom in early June. Only 
the name it bears is against 
it — Lonicera Korolkowi var. 
floribunda! Nor does the An- 
glicizing of this portentous 
name to the Abundant-bloom- 
ing Bush Honeysuckle of the 
Korolkow Mountain in China 
do us any good ! 
So let us discuss it just now 
as the Blue -leaved Honey- 
suckle, even though the color 
of the leaves is only blue by 
comparison with the normal 
average leaf-green. A rather 
dull glaucous green-blue would 
be more exact color guess, and 
these leaves are on twigs which 
when young are wine red, or 
“crushed strawberry” in hue. 
The arrangement of the leaves 
is peculiarly pleasing, so that, 
great shrub that it now is, this 
Lonicera arrests the attention 
at once of any garden visitor 
and adds great distinction to the shrubs that nudge it right 
and left. And high-flung wands of dainty pink cover it for 
ten days at the blooming season. 
After or during a shower too, or early enough in the morning 
to find the dew unevaporated, there is still another charm — the 
A FIND FOR THE WIDE-AWAKE GARDENER 
Both foliage and feathery spires are finely decorative. Astilbe Arendsii 
ideally fills a semi-shaded nook where less robust plants refuse to grow 
