e and cream-white flowers of most delightful
fragrance. Both can be trained up together with very pleasing effect.
There are other good sorts, but I consider that these two combine all
the best features of the entire list, therefore I would advise the
amateur gardener to concentrate his attention on them instead of
spreading it out over inferior kinds.

Every lover of flowers who sees the hybrid varieties of Clematis in
bloom is sure to want to grow them. They are very beautiful, it is true,
and few plants are more satisfactory when well grown. But--there's the
rub--to grow them well.

The variety known as _Jackmani_, with dark purple-blue flowers, is most
likely to succeed under amateur culture, but of late years it has been
quite unsatisfactory. Plants of it grow well during the early part of
the season, but all at once blight strikes them, and they wither in a
day, as if something had attacked the root, and in a short time they are
dead. This has discouraged the would-be growers of the large-flowered
varieties--for all of them seem to be subject to the same disease. What
this disease is no one seems able to say, and, so far, no remedy for it
has been advanced.

But in Clematis _paniculata_, we have a variety that I consider superior
in every respect to the large-flowered kinds, and to date no one has
reported any trouble with it. It is of strong and healthy growth, and
rampant in its habit, thus making it useful where the large-flowered
kinds have proved defective, as none of them are of what may be called
free growth. They grow to a height of seven or eight feet--sometimes
ten,--but have few branches, and sparse foliage. _Paniculata_, on the
contrary, makes a very vigorous growth--often twenty feet in a
season--and its foliage, unlike that of the other varieties, is
attractive enough in itself to make the plant well worth growing. It is
a rich, glossy green, and so freely produced that it furnishes a dense
shade. Late in the season, after most other plants are in "the sere and
yellow leaf" it is literally covered with great panicles of starry white
flowers which have a delightful fragrance. While this variety lacks the
rich color of such varieties as _Jackmani_ and others of the hybrid
class, it is really far more beautiful. Indeed, I know of no flowering
vine that can equal it in this respect. Its late-flowering habit adds
greatly to its value. It is not only healthy, but hardy--a quality no
one can afford to ov