Elymus is the blue-green Lyme Grass, a garden form of the handsome blue-leaved grass that grows on the seaward edges of many of our sea-shore sandhills. The Soapwort next to it is the double form of _Saponaria officinalis_, found wild in many places.
Of Ageratum, two kinds are used--a brightly coloured one of the dwarf kinds for places near the front, where it tells as a close mass of colour, and the tall _A. mexicanum_ for filling up further back in the border, where it shows as a diffuse purple cloud. The Nepeta is the good garden Catmint (_N. Mussini_). Its normal flowering time is June, but it is cut half back, removing the first bloom, by the middle of the month, when it at once makes new flowering shoots.
[Illustration: _YUCCAS AND GREY FOLIAGE._]
[Illustration: _A FRONT EDGE OF GREY FOLIAGE._]
Now, after the grey plants, the Gold garden looks extremely bright and sunny. A few minutes suffice to fill the eye with the yellow influence, and then we pass to the Blue garden, where there is another delightful shock of eye-pleasure. The brilliancy and purity of colour are almost incredible. Surely no blue flowers were ever so blue before! That is the impression received. For one thing, all the blue flowers used, with the exception of Eryngium and _Clematis davidiana_, are quite pure blues; these two are grey-blues. There are no purple-blues, such as the bluest of the Campanulas and the perennial Lupines; they would not be admissible. With the blues are a few white and palest yellow flowers; the foam-white _Clematis recta_, a delightful foil to Delphinium Belladonna; white perennial Lupine with an almond-like softness of white; _Spiræa Aruncus_, another foam-coloured flower. Then milk-white Tree Lupine, in its carefully decreed place near the bluish foliage of Rue and Yucca. Then there is the tender citron of Lupine Somerset and the full canary of the tall yellow Snapdragon, the diffused pale yellow of the soft plumy Thalictrum and the strong canary of _Lilium szovitzianum_, with white Everlasting Pea and white Hollyhock at the back. White-striped Maize grows up to cover the space left empty by the Delphiniums when their bloom is over, and pots of _Plumbago capense_ are dropped in to fill empty spaces. One group of this is trained over the bluish-leaved _Clematis recta_, which goes out of flower with the third week of July.