80 
House & Garden 
Although the Original of the Bureau 
Illustrated was Italian, this Replica 
may be Interestingly Assembled 
with Late Georgian Furniture. 
INQUIRIES INVITED THROUGH YOUR 
DECORATOR 
'W1 
2 84 Dartmouth St., 
BOSTON 
2 West 47 th - St., 
NEW YORK 
INC. 
How to Alter the Color of Floors 
(Continued from page SI) 
potency to color, and caution in using 
them is necessary. 
When bare boards are to be deep¬ 
ened in the natural color, the simplest 
and the best way to give tone, quality, 
and finish is a treatment of linseed oil. 
The oil must be slightly warmed to 
facilitate its spreading, and applied to 
the floor with clean cloths and rubbed 
in with a short-bristled fine hard brush. 
An old clothes brush answers the pur¬ 
pose well. It is important to remem¬ 
ber that the oiling must be done along 
with the grain and never across it, and 
that the smallest amount of oil consist¬ 
ent with easy working is the best. 
Clearly the treatment cannot be hur¬ 
ried ; it needs elbow-grease—hard and 
steady rubbing; the oil must penetrate, 
and when finished no trace should come 
off on the surface. Sometimes a weight 
wrapped in flannel is a help and speeds 
things up. Till a deal floor has been 
finished in this way, no one can realize 
what a quality of grain and of texture is 
latent in this common wood. 
Oak parquet blocks that are too yel¬ 
low cannot be altered to the proper 
tone merely by waxing, which deepens 
the tone but does not eliminate the yel¬ 
lowness. This is a quality of new oak 
which time alters, but it can be done 
by the hand of man very nearly as well. 
The wax must first be washed off, and 
when the blocks are quite dry, they 
should be treated with strong ammonia 
in a little water; this soaks in, greying 
the oak to the soft natural look in the 
process. Several applications may be 
needed before the grey triumphs over 
the crude yellowness. When it has been 
rewaxed the parquet floor will present 
an old and mellow appearance. This 
greying treatment does not darken the 
oak to any appreciable extent. A light 
oak parquet floor can be changed to a 
dark one by a very thin solution of 
japan black. 
Pyrethrums for Formal and Informal Gardens 
(Continued from page 69) 
plantings here in America. One, per¬ 
haps a sufficient one, is that the pyre- 
thrum is a very difficult plant to trans¬ 
port over long distances, and the im¬ 
porters find they cannot handle them 
profitably. Then, too, our very hottest 
weather sometimes tries them severely, 
causing them to crownrot. These, at 
all events, are the reasons the plant 
selling fraternity give us for not 
listing the choicer named varieties and 
offering us instead only seedlings in an 
indiscriminate mixture. 
These mixtures upon reaching the 
flowering stage produce in the main 
a single flower very like our common 
daisy, chrysanthemum leucanthemum, 
which by the way is itself an importa¬ 
tion. The similarity in the general ap¬ 
pearance of the two plants at flowering 
time is very marked. Fortunately, per¬ 
haps, the pyrethrum has not the same 
constitutional robustness of the field 
daisy, particularly in the matter of 
propagating itself, for it shows no ten¬ 
dency to overrun the meadows and pas¬ 
tures. The daisy foliage is coarser, that 
of the pyrethrum being much more 
feathery and fernlike in appearance. 
The flower stalks of the two plants are 
of about equal height. In regard to the 
flower itself, in the single type of the 
pyrethrum the difference is almost en¬ 
tirely one of color, and even the whitest 
pyrethrum is seldom without a trace 
of pink upon first opening, which it 
soon loses, however, becoming for all 
practical purposes as white as the daisy. 
From this fa.ntly flushed white with the 
typical daisy center the colors range 
through various tones of pink to a rich 
deep red in pyrethrum atrosanguin- 
arium. All of the colors are good and 
with the light airy grace it exhibits, the 
full headed plant is a most desirable 
acquisition for any garden. A well de¬ 
veloped specimen will send up above the 
feathery foliage a great number of 
nodding flowers, each rising on a sep¬ 
arate stalk to a height of from 18" to 
24". I can speak with some assurance 
of this nodding characteristic, for even 
in a light breeze I have been forced to 
wait for hours with my camera focused 
trying to surprise the plant in a mo¬ 
ment of restfulness. 
Discouraged at not being able to pro¬ 
cure the finer named sorts, I set about 
trying to obtain something that might 
at least approach an approximation of 
some of them through continued seed 
sowings of my own. At first I obtained 
a packet of seed from my favorite 
American grower. These were sown late 
in July in an outdoor seed bed. A 
large percentage of the seed sprouted, 
and by fall I had a goodly number of 
thrifty young plants. These were set 
out along the grape arbor in the garden 
some time in the fall. Snow came early 
and deep that year and so no other cov¬ 
ering was given the young plants. 
In the spring the new leaves started 
betimes, and soon the buds were rapidly 
pushing up above the dainty greenery. 
That first batch of seedlings proved to 
comprise mainly single types. There 
were a number of semi-doubles and two 
doubles. One of those with the double 
flowers was white with the character¬ 
istic pink flush, at first, and the other 
was a beautiful red tinted lighter, al¬ 
most white at the center. 
Since then I have made repeated sow¬ 
ings, using seeds of more aristocratic 
parentage, and as the plants seem per¬ 
fectly hardy, I am gradually adding to 
my collection singles, doubles, and in¬ 
termediate forms in considerable 
variety. 
With me the pyrethrum seems to de¬ 
mand no special coddling. It grows 
very satisfactorily in a well drained 
ordinarily rich garden soil. After the 
plant is through flowering, I cut it back 
rather closely; a scattering second crop 
of blooms may be induced to material¬ 
ize under this treatment. The main 
crop of flowers normally comes just at 
the close of the peony season and before 
the delphiniums are in full flower. It 
is useful in the hardy border or in the 
more formal plantings; I have used it in 
both places with equally good results. 
One pyrethrum characteristic which 
makes it especially desirable is its value 
as a cut flower. I know of nothing 
that will outlast it in water. Aster 
blooms last as long perhaps, but aster 
stems have an unfortunate proneness to 
decomposition, which the pyrethrum 
does not exhibit to anything like the 
same extent. 
One of the accompanying photo¬ 
graphs gives an idea of its beauty as a 
cut flower. The outdoor picture is less 
successful, owing to the difficulty of 
catching the plants at rest, already re¬ 
ferred to. By studying the picture of 
the flowers in the vase one can easily 
distinguish the various types of bloom 
one is likely to obtain from a packet 
of seeds. It is better to buy the seed of 
the double sorts. Many of them will 
give single flowers, but in this way one 
will likely have a greater variety. 
