Old Time Gardens 
260 
ing the Hepatica Squirrelcups (a name I never 
heard given them elsewhere), says they form “ a 
graceful company hiding in their bells a soft aerial 
blue.” Of course, they vary through blue and 
pinky purple, but the blue is well hidden, and I 
never think of them save as an almost white flower. 
Nor are the Violets as lovely on the meadow and 
field slopes, as the mild Innocence, the Houstonia, 
called also Bluets, which is scarcely a distinctly blue 
expanse, but rather ‘ c a milky way of minute stars.” 
An English botanist denies that it is blue at all. A 
field covered with Innocence always looks to me as 
if little clouds and puffs of blue-white smoke had 
descended and rested on the grass. 
I well recall when the Aquilegia, under the name 
of California Columbine, entered my mother’s gar- 
den, to which its sister, the red and yellow Colum- 
bine, had been brought from a rocky New England 
pasture when the garden was new. This Aquilegia 
came to us about the year 1870. I presume old 
catalogues of American florists would give details 
and dates of the journey of the plant from the Pa- 
cific to the Atlantic. It chanced that this first Aqui- 
legia of my acquaintance was of a distinct light blue 
tint; and it grew apace and thrived and was vastly 
admired, and filled the border with blueness of 
that singular tint seen of late years in its fullest 
extent and most prominent position in the great 
masses of bloom of the blue Hydrangea, the show 
plant of such splendid summer homes as may be 
found at Newport. These blue Hydrangeas are 
ever to me a color blot. They accord with no other 
