332 
bed, and the one which surprised me the most of all 
that have passed through my hands these ten years past. 
It is a hardy perennial, with the flowers and habit of a 
good dark-red Phlox Drummonclii, and is clearly a cross 
between an annual and a perennial; but I know nothing 
more of its biography. When I was told of it, last 
year, by my friend Mr. Latter, our champion cucumber 
grower, now a prosperous nurseryman near Ipswich, I 
could not make up my mind at all to his account of its 
parentage, for it is not often that we see or hear of a 
genuine cross between such parents. Indeed, I cannot 
at this moment bring another such instance to recollec¬ 
tion, although I have worked in that line for more than 
twenty years, and had the advantage of a correspondence 
with the masters of the art among ourselves and on the 
Continent; but there it is, and if it will seed, there is 
little chance for the Drummondii after a few years. 
Whoever named it made a great mistake; cross seedlings 
should never be named after the manner of botanical or 
wild original species. I have often been saddled with 
queer names which I never thought of; but I hardly 
ever name one of my own seedlings. 
The border plant I had last autumn from the Horti¬ 
cultural Society, is a Penstemon, called Azureum, and it is 
the most graceful of that graceful family ; not so gaudy, 
of course, as the red ones, but a better style of growth 
than any of them. Its leaves are so narrow that one 
can see every joint and part of the stems, and the stems 
themselves so thickly furnished with the flowers all the 
way up, that every joint has a whorl of them. The 
height is, with me, about twenty inches; the plant was 
stopped three or four times, so that it is quite a bush. 
It comes from cuttings as easily as verbenas, and, if it 
were planted in a bed as thick as wo do the verbenas, I 
should not be surprised to hear of its turning out a good 
autumn bedder; a neutral one it must be, for azureum, 
or azure blue, does not describe the colour of the 
flowers at all, they are of a mixed colour, blue, brown, 
and purple shades. It seeds quite free, and if it would 
cross with the true Penstemon gentianoides, which is 
also of a purplish blue colour, both might possibly be 
improved, and run into useful varieties, like the blue 
larkspurs, of which I am afraid we have lost the true 
blue branching variety: I had a row of it as lately as 
1812, but cannot find it since. Many of our readers 
were so kind as to send mo seeds, and specimens in 
flower, of what they believed to be this variety, but no, 
no, all of them had the purple tinge. 
The Horticultural Society sent out the true Penstemon 
gentianoides a few years since, but instead of “ true,” they 
put “ vera ” on the labels, the botanical Latin word for 
true; and an honest friend of mine kept the plant in the 
stove till it filled the house with red spider, thinking, all 
the time, from this vera, that the plant was from Vera 
Cruz, the hottest part of the Mexican coast, and to this 
day he says it is a rascally bad thing ! Still, I am in 
hopes it may be the means of getting us a race of blue 
ones by the help of azureum. Being two wild species, 
they may refuse to cross; but I have known two or three 
instances in which this has been overcome, and it is the 
most singular thing I have met with in these experi¬ 
ments. If they will really refuse, get up a lot of seed¬ 
lings from each of them, and although to all appearance 
these seedlings may seem to be nothing but a recast of 
the old parents, the chances are, that out of the lot some 
one will take to the pollen of one of the others, and 
even if all these refused to cross, there is yet another 
chance, through another generation of seedlings, and 
so on, for no one can say how many generations. 
It is not by bestowing the best culture on a wild or 
cross seedling plant for half a generation, that we can 
got it domesticated, as it were, so as to produce a better, 
but by raising seedlings from seedlings every year, 
which in the long run may produce a break in the 
[August 28. 
original qualities of the stock parent, through cultiva¬ 
tion. 
If we say that the White Horse shoe geranium has 
been grown well for the last 21 years, and that fresh 
cuttings of it were made every year to continue it 
on, it is no more improved in its nature for the cross 
breeder than it was 20 years since. It may turn out 
that I may never cross another white geranium, but 
whoever chooses to follow out this plan with the 
miserable lot of seedlings I flowered this season, will 
be sure to succeed, sooner or later. 
Last spring I suggested a trial of a pretty little blue¬ 
flowering British plant—the Veronica chamadrys —to 
have it taken up and divided into small pieces, each 
having roots, as w r e do other plants of the same habit, 
to prolong their flowering. This Veronica comes into 
flower early in May, and is one of our best blue flower¬ 
ing native plants, growing along the road-sides in dry 
places, and on banks and waste-grounds everywhere all 
over the kingdom. It lasts in bloom about a month 
or five weeks, and as it follows on the heels of the 
blue Ncmophila from autumn sown seeds, — is just 
of the same size and way of growth; and, moreover, 
can be removed to a private corner, as soon as the 
flowering is over, early in June, without sustaining the 
least harm, I would strongly recommend a little bed of 
it to be tried on its old merits next May; but this is the 
best time to think about it. Any good gardener in any 
parish in the three kingdoms can point it out to ama¬ 
teurs ; and it might be planted as soon as a small bed is 
cleared in the autumn, or it might be used as an edging 
plant to a large bed, in which a mixture of the common 
spring plants are to bloom. I made seven little beds 
of it last April, and that was in time for flowering. The 
beds were on gravel, in circles, and only two feet across, 
with a strong, old standard rose in the middle of each ; 
so that, if the experiment did not succeed, nobody 
should be offended by the failure in the very centre of 
the garden. Well, the experiment did fail completely. 
The late removal of the plants might have caused this, 
however, and the experiment will be repeated next 
spring, when the plants will be divided six weeks sooner. 
Last May they were put back a fortnight by the removal, 
but they flowered out their full time most beautifully, 
though they did not go on a day longer than their wonted 
time in a state of nature. Ever since, they have made 
as pretty a carpet for the rose-standards as any at the 
Crystal Palace; and the good soil and freedom from 
other plants have made a great change for the better in 
their looks. They might now be mistaken for some 
dwarf Verbena out of bloom ; and, if it were needed, the 
seven little plants would now, or very soon, furnish fifty 
or sixty plants each, and the whole came from a single 
wild patch last April; so that, if once tried, there is no 
fear either of getting a good stock of it, or that any one 
would give it up after a year or two. 
I find that one can manage to have the other new 
mixture of Zauschneria and Guphca, either as a reddish 
bed tinged with orange, or as an orange bed tinged 
with red. I see, also, that in another year it would 
improve the bed to have a row of the Zauschneria planted 
all round it, without the mixture; and that would much 
improve it, looking at it from a distance. The way that 
the red or orange tint is given is, by going over the bed 
once in ten or fourteen days from the middle of July, 
and cutting or thinning out the shoots of one of the 
plants ; thus giving more play to the shoots and flowers 
of the other plant. Eor my own individual opinion— 
which, however, I have no wish to force upon others— 
I prefer an exact balance of the two plants and colours; 
if one of them gets stronger than the other, let it be 
thinned, of the longest and oldest shoots; and my reason 
is this—for opinions without explanation are no better 
than green gooseberries—do what we like, this bed can- 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER, 
