m N VICTORIAN days anyone making an excursion from 
y the straight and narrow or who loitered along the 
way was said to be treading the Primrose Path and 
the signpost for the good life pointed the other way. 
Contemporary times, however, have modified the 
quaint usage until now the Primrose Path is usually 
associated with the growing of Primroses and the 
gentle pleasures it affords. All who grow Primroses 
know them to be as irresistible and infectious as 
music and laughter—the merry, melodious kind that turns 
every season into spring. And those who grow Primroses are 
never without a certain sense of eagerness from the time the 
snow melts until the earth renews itself for yet another year. 
Do you remember finding the first blue Primrose of the 
season in a sheltered spot of your garden at the edge of ice 
and snow and how like a piece of summer sky or an indigo 
pool it seemed? Here we can never remember which was 
first, the Primrose or the robin. And by March the trickle of 
bloom is swelled to a stream so that when the swallows return 
the whole family of blues, the gay and many-colored Acaulis, 
the countless blossoms of the Julianas and the more pre- 
cocious of the Polyanthus have also arrived. 
April brings a cloudburst of bloom with the Polyanthus in 
full swing, the early blooming ones still in great strength and 
the first of the late ones all trying out colors and shades with- 
out end on the brown pallette of the earth. If February, March 
and April are exciting, May is no less with gracefully dom- 
inating Asiatics, bold of color and design, and Auriculas whose 
petals are velvet and whose fragrance is illusive and provoc- 
ative. 
Part of the Primrose appeal lies in their earliness, their 
pledge of impending warmth, of another spring and the ful- 
fillment of a larger promise. Because the wild forms—an- 
cestors of the beautiful garden hybrids—are so widespread 
many of our forbears gathered Primroses in childhood days 
seeking them out in the lee of rocks, along streamsides and 
in thinly wooded spots. Those from the British Isles can 
never forget the Primroses that grow in the lanes, hedgerows 
and dunes, nor can the Scandinavians, French and Germans 
who gathered them in moist pastures, light woods and on 
ditch banks. The Austrians, Swiss, Italians from the north, 
the Balkans, Turks and Russians all have Primroses, and had 
it been customary for Afghans, Tibetans, peoples of the In- 
dian Himalayas and Chinese mountaineers of the western 
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