THE SWEET O 5 THE YEAR 
4 1 
carpets, it was touched to a fantastic beauty that 
charmed the eye, and took the imagination, as it were, 
by storm, perhaps in part by reason of that very strange¬ 
ness of proportion and of colour. The effect, too, was 
vastly helped by a liberal underplanting of auriculas, 
primulas, and polyanthus, whose dim moth-like dyes 
made both for emphasis and relief in the scheme of 
kaleidoscopic splendour. 
I have had nothing quite so barbarously beautiful this 
year, albeit some of the tulip plots looked well enough 
with their milder mosaics ; the kingly Keizerskroon, for 
example, with its bold and yet refined contours and 
opulent gold-rimmed crimson petals, blended in royal 
state with the Duchesse de Parma and Thomas Moore 
—two rarely beautiful tulips that are sometimes taken 
for one another by the superficial observer. But they 
wear their red with a difference; her rich bloom is 
more suffused with ruby and russet, while he glows 
with a clearer flood of orange-tawny. Besides, he boasts 
more inches than she. Very simple in its na'ive success 
is the bed of mingled white and yellow Pottebakkers, 
whose broad-built curves would seem as absolutely 
Dutch as is their name, that bounds the second lawn 
beyond the clipped yew peacocks, with a wave of 
colour wonderfully opaque and pure. And the bed 
that grows the great goblets of rose-flushed ivory that 
florists call Joost van Vondel in its centre, flanked by 
dainty roses and lilies of the fair Rose Luisante and 
Cottage Maid, shows as gay and exquisite a festal air as 
any painted garden fete of Fragonard or Boucher. 
Again, the stately White Swan rising above thronged 
