Avens

AVENS, Geum coccineu

AMONGST the many pleasures a townsman may look for when rambling through a country village, the discovery of exquisitely beautiful flowers in the gardens of humble cottagers may be reckoned as of some account. You have, perhaps, been revelling for years amidst bedding plants and stately trees, and other fashionable and genteel items of a proper garden. But you have for a season quitted these rural scenes to find rest in things rustic, and in an idle mood you lean upon a fence and look over. Stars and planets ! What a blaze of flowers of sorts unseen till now has this humble horticulturist accumulated! Here are masses of colour that compel one's lip to curl with contempt for all ordinary bedding, and combinations and features that to the unaccustomed eye, well rested from the wear and tear of town, appear to over-pass the reach of art, and often, of course, are the result of some happy accident. But there are cultivated amateurs who appreciate such things and form collections, and find therein delights that are certainly different and doubtless higher in tone than a mere following the fashion would afford, unless, indeed, it became the fashion to render the garden truly representative of the infinite variety and beauty of the vegetation of the world. The subject before us illustrates the case. You may find the scarlet avens and perhaps two or three sorts of potentillas in the country garden, and you may, again, find them in the garden of the eclectic collector; but in the garden "of the period," where carpet colouring, and evergreen clipped into round balls, are prominent features, such things are utterly unknown.

The earth is plentifully furnished with beautiful plants, and it is a matter both for surprise and thankfulness that an immense proportion of the happy throng may be grown to perfection in our gardens. The species of geum that have been introduced to this country as hardy plants, adapted for the open rockery and border, number over thirty, and they are natives variously of North America, Chili, Kamtschatka, Russia, Volhinia, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, and the hills of Greece. That very few of them are now to be found is no fault of the plants, for if they were all re-introduced and displayed with judgment, they would be found as beautiful as ever, and as fully as ever entitled to reproach men for their perversity in neglecting the simplest and cheapest and most lasting and ever-changing of all garden pleasures.