May 31,1883.] JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 451 
over this fascinating landscape, but ‘ scattered ’ is a word which 
certainly does not apply in this case. Their profusion in the 
Ojai and similar valleys is indescribable. Try to picture a whole 
country side covered, not with any single flower, but with a score 
of species and varieties at once, showing a dazzling arrangement 
of luxurious tints—purple, and magenta, and gold, and cardinal 
red, and creamy white, and rising in royal splendour here and 
there great patches of Eschscholtzias, whose yellow petals deepen¬ 
ing to a rich orange centre make the most intense colour it is 
possible to imagine. The purple wild Hyacinth and the yellow 
Pansy were the commonest flowers at the beginning of the season. 
Colour after colour has been added to the show, and so far the 
old beauties still remain by the side of the new. There is a 
certain favoured meadow in the Ojai Valley which looks more 
like a painter’s palette than anything in nature, and every week 
I find some fresh splendour added to it. Just now, after I had 
Fig. 08.— Allium neapolitaxum. (Sec rage 452.) 
thought the array exhausted, up spring masses of blue Larkspur 
much richer in shade and much ampler in size than the Larkspur 
of our eastern gardens, and the meadow takes on a wholly novel 
glory. The flowers will last some time yet, but the vernal bright¬ 
ness of the herbage is already past. At the end of March the 
deciduous trees, White Oaks, Sycamores, Black Walnuts, and 
Cottonwoods, were not yet in full leaf, some of them half bare, 
but the grass was beginning to turn yellow. A rain afterwards 
revived it. By the end of April, however, the green on the slopes 
and roadsides was withering fast, and the dry and dusty ground 
began to suggest the pitiless summer. It is only for three or four 
weeks that this natural garden can be seen in its full beauty.” 
-At the monthly meeting of the Meteorological So¬ 
ciety, held on the 16th inst., Mr. J. K. Laughton, M.A., F.R.A.S., 
President, in the chair, F. A. Bellamy, T. A. Mercer, Rev. H. J. 
Poole, and A. Wise, M.D., were elected Fellows of the Society. 
The following papers were read :—1, “ Composite Portraiture 
