Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

The orange Crown Imperials do best here, so, of coarse, I feel proudest of the pale yellow. Both colours are unusually good this year. In my youth they were rather sniffed at and called a cottage plant. I wonder if anyone who thought them vulgar ever took the trouble to pick off one of the down-hanging bells and turn it up to see the six drops of clear water in the six white cups with black rims? I know nothing prettier or more curious amongst flowers than this. I have not got the white one, but must try and get it ; I am told it is very pretty, and so it must be, I should think. The lovely little Omphalodes verna (' Blue-eyed Mary,' Mr. Robinson calls it) is in flower under my trees. The soil is too dry for it to flourish very successfully, and yet it is always worth growing everywhere. Next year I shall try lifting it in March and putting it into pots. The great thing is to remember that it divides and propagates much better in early spring than in autumn. The graceful, pale grey 72 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN anemone Hobinsomana is doing better this year. Now that it has taken hold, I hope it may spread. All the early tulips and some of the later are out ; what delicious things they are ! None are better than Gesneriana greigi and sylvestris. The beautiful Parrot Tulips will come later. Ornithogalum nutans is a weed most people dread to get into their borders, and not un- naturally ; but if put in a place where spreading does no harm, or planted in grass, where it does not flourish very much, it is a bulb well worth growing. It blooms better if divided every two or three years. The flowers are very lovely when cut, and, like all their tribe, they last well in water, looking most refined and uncommon, and are es- pecially good to send to London. I do not make many remarks here on the lovely family of spring bulbs — Tulips, Scillas, Hyacinths, Daffodils, and Narcisses — for the same reason that I passed casually over the forced ones in February. We can all grow these easily enough by mark- ing the catalogue and paying the bill. Anybody who does not understand their cultivation will find every detail on the subject in the older gardening books, as I have stated before. Of all the Dutch nurserymen from whom I have bought bulbs, J. J. Thoolen at Overveen, near Haarlem, is the cheapest, though I do not say that he is better or worse than any other. In my experience, all the finer kinds of bulbs are better for taking up in June or July, well dried in the sun, and planted again in September. When they are planted in grass they must, of course, be left alone to take their chance. Nothing can be more delightful than the spring bulbs. I grow them in every way I can — in pots, in beds, in borders, and in the grass. Besides the Bulbs, the Arums, and the Azaleas, I have in the little greenhouse next the drawing-room several very pretty Primula sieboldii : they remain in the frames in pots during the summer, to die down entirely, and are APRIL 73