and a grass border (two feet wide) to run round the outside. This size can easily be modified as the bed to be planted may be larger or smaller.

The plants represented by letters are bulbs; the figures denoting perennial herbaceous plants. Both classes may be allowed to remain many years without being disturbed.

All the plants flower during April and May.

This bed of bulbs will make a very gay appearance from April to the middle of May.

As the flowers of the bulbs fade, there will be a time when the bed will be rather bare unless a few herbaceous plants are interspersed.

These should be, generally, low growers, and such as will be out of bloom before the bedding-plants and annuals come into flower, — which will be by the middle of June.

This same garden may, about the middle of May, be planted with annuals, &c., as directed in our last.

The following spring-blooming herbaceous plants are very ornamental. They should, generally, be planted about a foot every way from each other :

1. Hepatica triloba flore pleno rubra et coerulea 4. Trollius Europæus (globe-flower).

The following arrangement is pretty for a narrow border under a south window; and, where the underpinning of the house is of stone, the snowdrops will often be in bloom in February.

The border is represented three feet wide by eighteen feet long,

square representing one foot by two feet:

each

These arrangements are equally effective from the house and the street. If only a general mass of color is wanted, after the bulbs have bloomed, the beds may be sown with portulaca early in the spring.

The plants

will begin to bloom in early summer, will soon cover the bed, and, until November, give a brilliant carpet of rose, red, yellow, orange, scarlet, and white, with an infinity of shades.

The roots do not strike deep enough to injure the bulbs; and, when the plants are killed by frost, the bed will be ready for a top-dressing of manure, to insure fine bloom upon the bulbs the next spring.

No further sowing of portulaca will be required, as it will come up freely every year.

For climbers for the trellis against the window, we have few plants well adapted.

The object must be to find a plant with fine foliage, which is also ornamental in flower and fruit. The common Virginia creeper, or woodbine (Ampelopsis Virginica), answers well our purpose, and is very showy when autumn changes the foliage.

The Dutchman's pipe (Aristolochia sipho) has broad, light-green leaves, and curious flowers, and, when once established, is a rampant grower.

The Chinese wistaria (W. sinensis) is always pretty; and the drooping spikes of papilionaceous flowers are very ornamental.

The trumpet-flower (Bignonia radicans and grandiflora) is showy, and climbs to a great height.

Canadian moonseed (Menispermum Canadense) is very pretty, and profuse in foliage. Where both male and female plants are obtained, the berry is ornamental.

For low climbers, we cannot too highly recommend various species of clematis, of which C. flammula, montana, Virginica, and azurea grandiflora, are the best. Should the new English varieties so recently obtained prove hardy in our latitude, they will give a variety of color and habit very rarely found in one family.

Roses and honeysuckles are too ragged, and last too short a time in perfection, to find room where there is so little space as in a city garden. The Japanese evergreen twining honeysuckle is, perhaps, an exception to this remark.

Ivy is generally not hardy in New England. Where it will stand the winter, it is a beautiful climber.

In a future number, we propose to treat of the improvement of the backyard.

GLEN RIDGE, 1866.

Edward Sprague Rand, Jun.

THE PAWPAW.

We propose a brief discussion of a subject which has never had full justice, characteristic American fruits. Think not to pass in review a horticultural catalogue. The apple, alas! grew in the Garden of Eden. The peach betrays its origin in its specific designation, "Persica." The Romans named for us the cherry and the plum. Our most luscious strawberry is the "Triumph of Ghent." A well-grown Antwerp raspberry fears no comparisons. No grapery of ordinary pretension is without the Black Hamburg and the Muscat ; while of pears, alas! foreign varieties are the finest.

But these, and the thousand others which they represent, however kindly they grow on American soil, are in no proper sense American fruits. Their names unmistakably declare their lineage. They have been gathered from the East and the West, from the North and the South. Certain fruits there are, however, which deserve the name "American," our right to which there is none to dispute; and, as is eminently fit, they are known only by native American names. Pawpaws and persimmons make no suggestions of Europe or Asia. Their quaint and homely designations are thoroughly in keeping with their history. Indeed, the pawpaw hints in its reduplicated form at the paucity of words in a barbarous dialect.

Of this fruit, the pawpaw, we wish to speak. We do not remember to have seen, in book, pamphlet, or newspaper, the mention of its name, except in technical botanical treatises, where, as for instance in Gray's, it receives but a very cursory and ungracious notice; and yet we deliberately set it down as the most delicious fruit that ever touched our palate. We know very well, both in Latin and the vernacular, the motto about tastes; and we are willing to confess that we speak with the zeal of a neophyte,

and that, to many, this fruit is exceedingly distasteful: but still there are enough on every hand, in the region where the pawpaw perfects itself, to sanction our own most extravagant estimates.

The pawpaw comes of a good lineage. It is the only North-American representative of the Anonacea, the famous custard-apple family of the tropics. How this solitary genus should have been so widely parted from its allies, we leave the Darwinians to explain. We have heard the eminent professor of botany in Harvard descant upon the luscious richness of the tropical custard-apple; and, when we found our own pawpaw worthy of all his praise, we felt almost indignant over this curt description (Gray's 'Manual,” page 17),—"yellowish, sweet, and edible in autumn:" but our indignation was turned into compassion when we concluded, from the dimensions of the fruit that accompany this description, that he knew no other specimens than those which had struggled through a dying life in the Cambridge Botanic Garden. It would be but little farther from justice to characterize the orange from specimens ripened in the bay-window of a New-England farm-house.

Follow the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude, from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, and you will traverse the home of the pawpaw. Within a degree or two on each side, almost all its chosen haunts will be found. There are outlying groves east of the mountains (a post-office in Michigan rejoices in its euphonious name); but in the southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, it occurs in the greatest abundance and perfection.

The tree itself is very attractive. Its clean, well-kept bark, its wealth of foliage, its soldierly bearing, all conspire to make it in itself a most desirable addition to the horticulturist's resources. But, of the fruit, what worthy account can be given? At the last Ohio State Fair, a painting in oil, of a bunch of pawpaws, was exhibited, admirable alike for fidelity and execution. With the aid of engravings drawn from such or more direct sources, a description might have some chance of success; but we must venture without any such extraneous assistance.

From one to seven fruits in a cluster, each measuring four, five, six, or even seven inches in length, and from two to three inches in diameter, and very like to a banana in shape, depending (in their ripened state) from a leaf

less branch, so small that its burden surprises you; of the most delicate imaginable shade of green, with a bloom as sensitive as that upon a white grape or a plum; as yellow within as the richest of cream, and softer than the ripest of peaches; with a fruity odor that leads you as true if not as far as a blossoming orange-tree; with a flavor, which, if it were not all its own, you would liken to nectar, to ambrosia, to your highest ideal in the realm of tastes, this is the pawpaw. I have eaten the lotus, and don't want to go back," wrote a college president who was transported from Massachusetts to Southern Ohio. Like the cardinal-bird and the scarlet tanager, which gleam and burn amid its branches, it reminds us of the tropics. Indeed, in its own character, as well as in its botanical relations, it is the most genuine representative of the fruits which a vertical sun can ripen, that this corner of the world produces. As such, it will be sure, with the increase of horticultural zeal and knowledge, to come to a wider recognition and welcome. Had Thoreau wandered West instead of North, and found an Ohio pawpaw-grove in some calm October day, our gardens and our literature would certainly have been the richer.

YELLOW SPRINGS, O.

FLOWERS OF MAY.

(Concluded.)

As May advances, flowers succeed each other in such profusion, that to describe them all would be an endless task. As brevity above all other virtues is indispensable in magazine articles, nothing remains for us but to choose a few of the most conspicuous from among the floral array, and, for the time, leave the rest in a neglect which very many of them are far from deserving. But first we must observe, that, from the middle of May to the middle of June, a judicious choice and arrangement of hardy perennials alone will enliven the garden with colors as rich and as various as those of the bedding-plants at the middle and end of summer. No color will be wanting. For masses of blue, we have veronicas, lupines, dwarf iris, and, a little later, Delphinium sinense in its varieties; for yellow, trollius, Doronicum Caucasium, Achillea tomentosa, and Alyssum saxatile; for red.