THE BREATH OF AUTUMN 
95 
Undimmed by drought, robust as they are beautiful, 
these great red and golden daisies play their part 
royally in the year’s pageant. Nor is this their only 
wear. On the contrary, I find it hard to keep count 
of their varieties, that range from pure, pale gold to 
bronze, from orange-scarlet to copper. Some are 
ringed and fringed with rich dyes of carbuncle and dark 
rose, others bloom blood-red with dim emblazonings of 
amber, while not the least beautiful shows a fine disc 
of topaz-yellow petals set round about a heart of ebony. 
Although spring begins the garden’s Age of Gold, it 
is left for late summer to play King Midas to perfec¬ 
tion, bringing into being these hosts of stately, scentless 
flowers that gild the parterre with a stronger and more 
mundane lustre than that which lit those early idyllic 
days. The splendours of the Sunflower, Autumn’s 
Oriflamme as one might call it, are unfolding more 
fully day by day in gorgeous multiplicities of shape and 
tone and stature. Here are perennials and annuals, tall 
and short, massive and slender, shining like golden 
pomegranates of Eden through open spaces of the wild 
garden, and making sunlight in the shady places of the 
shrubberies. On the kitchen-garden also they confer 
an air of lordly pleasuring, for I like well to see their 
rich crowns neighbouring my tall green scarlet-threaded 
hedges of runner beans, or nodding high above the 
broad lush leafage and honey-coloured blossoms of the 
trailing marrow. Prettiest, in my eyes at least, of all 
perennial sunflowers is the elegant Harpalium , the 
Prairie Sunflower, with its profusion of slim-petalled 
blooms of a pure full yellow, each centred with an 
