House and Garden 
RT.UE HYDRANGEAS 
this is because each season gives us new varieties 
which seem improvements, so far as color goes, on 
anything that has gone before. We are getting nearer 
each year to the scarlet flower florists have long had 
in mind, one that shall have no hint of orange 
or brown in it. Already we have pinks that are 
without the lilac and violet tinge that character¬ 
ized them a few years ago. Some day we will have 
a true rose-colored chrysanthemum, a reflection of 
the color on the petals of a daybreak carnation. 
There’s no telling what we may not have among 
these favorite plants, if the florists keep on experi¬ 
menting with them. They are plants of wonderful 
possibilities. 
Hut I do hope we won’t have any more shaggy 
monstrosities such as have characterized most of 
our fall shows of late years. Flowers they were, in a 
sense, but freak flowers, great, awkward, overgrown 
things to wonder at, but not to admire. They 
attract the attention but they do not win the masses 
as the smaller, saner varieties do. One florist had a 
whole booth given up to small-flowered sorts, last 
year, at one of our great autumn exhibitions, and 
there was a great crowd of admiring men and 
women about them every day, and all day. The 
simple beauty of the blossoms, allowed to grow 
naturally, challenged universal admiration, and I 
was pleased to hear the commendatory things that 
were constantly being said about them. “One can 
like such a flower,” a man said to me, “but those 
big things over there” — with a jerk of his thumb in 
the direction of a group of single-flowered plants 
with blossoms nearly a foot across—“I don’t care 
for any of them in mine, 
thank you! They belong in 
the dime museum class.” I 
agreed with him. They were 
interesting in so far as they 
showed what the skill of 
the florist can do, but as 
flowers they were not “ likea¬ 
ble.” And a flower that you 
can’t like is lacking in some 
of the chief elements that all 
flowers ought to possess. 
At that show, I found 
several chrysanthemums that 
pleased me greatly. So much 
so that I arranged for the 
exhibitor to send me plants 
for this season. He did so, 
and they have afforded me 
keener delight in my own 
greenhouse, than they did 
when I saw them on dress 
parade. They belong to the 
semi-double type. There are 
not petals enough to hide the yellow disc at the 
centre of the flower, and this heightens the beauty 
of it wonderfully. We have been educated to the 
belief that unless a chrysanthemum was very double 
it was not worth growing. 
This is all wrong. Do you admire a daisy Of 
course you do. But would you admire it as you do 
now if its petals were multiplied ? I think not. One 
of the charms of the flower is in its simple beauty. It 
is so with the semi-double chrysanthemums I am 
speaking of. As you will see, by the illustration 
accompanying this article, the flowers are not 
large, but they are perfect in form, and they have 
a grace which the large, very double sorts always 
lack. 
These are likeable kinds—the kinds you make 
friendship with. Try some of them, next season, 
and if you don’t get tenfold more pleasure from them 
than you do from the “standard” sorts, set me down 
as a false prophet. 
There is a plant I want to speak a good word for, 
for winter use. It is catalogued as Browalha major. 
Some catalogues, I notice, call it B. gigantea. The 
two terms stand for the same thing. It is of a 
lovely shade of dark blue,—a very rare color among 
winter-flowering plants. Its flowers are not large— 
though you would infer as much from the specific 
name of the catalogues—but there 'are so many of 
them that a plant is quite a flower-show in itself. 
The plant branches very freely, and every branch 
will bear from half a dozen to a score of flowers, 
from December to May. It is of somewhat slender 
habit of growth, and must be given support of some 
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