Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
History
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
How the Campanulaceae enriched the beauty and the blueness of the garden.
We had our splendid clusters of Canterbury Bells, both blue and white. I
have told elsewhere of our love for them in childhood. Equally dear to
us was a hardy old Campanula whose full name I know not, perhaps it is
the Pyramidalis; it is shown on page 263, the very plant my mother set
out, still growing and blooming; nothing in the garden is more gladly
welcomed from year to year. It partakes of the charm shared by every
bell-shaped flower, a simple form, but an ever pleasing one. We had also
the _Campanula persicifolia_ and _trachelium_, and one we called
Bluebells of Scotland, which was not the correct name. It now has died
out, and no one recalls enough of its exact detail to learn its real
name. The showiest bell-flower was the _Platycodon grandiflorum_, the
Chinese or Japanese Bell-flower, shown on page 264. Another name is the
Balloon-flower, this on account of the characteristic buds shaped like
an inflated balloon. It is a lovely blue in tint, though this photograph
was taken from a white-flowered plant in the white border at Indian
Hill. The Giant Bell-flower is a _fin de siecle_ blossom named
_Ostrowskia_, with flowers four inches deep and six inches in diameter;
it has not yet become common in our gardens, where the _Platycodon_
rules in size among its bell-shaped fellows.
[Illustration: The Old Campanula.]
There are several pretty low-growing blue flowers suitable for edgings,
among them the tiny stars of the Swan River Daisy (_Brachycome
iberidifolia_) sold as purple, but as brightly blue as Scilla. The
dwarf Ageratum is also a long-blossoming soft-tinted blue flower; it
made a charming edging in my sister's garden last summer; but I should
never put either of them on the edge of the blue border.
[Illustration: Chinese Bell-flower.]
The dull blue, sparsely set flowers of the various members of the Mint
family have no beauty in color, nor any noticeable elegance; the Blue
Sage is the only vivid-hued one, and it is a true ornament to the
border. Prunella was ever found in old gardens, now it is a wayside
weed. Thoreau loved the Prunella for its blueness, its various lights,
and noted that its color deepened toward night. This flower, regarded
with indifference by nearly every one, and distaste by many, always to
him suggested coolness and freshness by its presence. The Prunella was
beloved also by Ruskin, who called it the soft warm-scented Brunelle,
and told of the fine purple gleam of its hooded blossom: "the two
uppermost petals joined like an old-fashioned enormous hood or bonnet;
the lower petal torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe,"--and he
said it was a "Brownie flower," a little eerie and elusive in its
meaning. I do not like it because it has such a disorderly, unkempt
look, it always seems bedraggled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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