The dwarf salvias, too, grow readily from seed, and balsams, if one has room, line up finely along straight walks, the firm blossoms of the camelia-flowered variety, with their delicate rosettes of pink, salmon, and lavender, also serving to make novel table decorations when arranged in many ways with leaves of the laurel, English ivy, or fern fronds.

Portulaca, though cousin to the objectionable “pusley,” is most useful where mere colour is wanted to cover the ground in beds that have held early tulips or other spring bulbs, as well as for covering dry, sandy spots where little else will grow.  It should not be planted until really warm weather, and therefore may be scattered between the rows of narcissi and late tulips when their tops are cut off, and by the time they are quite withered and done away with, the cheerful portulaca, feeding upon the hottest sunbeams, will begin to cover the ground, a pleasure to the eye as well as a decorative screen to the bulbs beneath, sucking the fiercest sun rays before they penetrate.

Chief among the low-growing worthies comes the verbena, good for bedding, good for cutting, and in some of the mammoth varieties subtly fragrant.  Verbenas may be raised to advantage in a hotbed, but if the seed be soaked overnight in warm water, it will germinate freely out of doors in May and be a mass of bloom from July until late October.  For beds grouped around a sundial or any other garden centre, the verbena has no peer; its trailing habit gives it grace, the flowers are borne erect, yet it requires no staking and it is easily controlled by pinching or pinning to the soil with stout hair-pins.

One little fragrant flower, fraught with meaning and remembrance, belongs to the annuals, though its family is much better known among the half-hardy perennials that require winter protection here.  This is the gold and brown annual wall-flower, slender sister of die gelbe violet, and having that same subtle violet odour in perfect degree.  It cannot be called a decorative plant, but it should have plenty of room given it in the bed of sweet odours and be used as a border on the sunny side of wall or fence, where, protected from the wind and absorbing every ray of autumn sunlight, it will often give you at least a buttonhole bouquet on Christmas morning.

[Illustration:  THE SUMMER GARDEN—­VERBENAS.]

The cosmos is counted by catalogues and culturists one of the most worthy of the newer annuals, and so it is when it takes heed to its ways and behaves its best, but otherwise it has all the terrible uncertainty of action common to human and garden parvenues.  From the very beginning of its career it is a conspicuous person, demanding room and abundance of food.  Thinking that its failure to bloom until frost threatened was because I had sown the seed out of doors in May, I gave it a front room in my very best hotbed early in March, where, long before the other occupants of