And taper fingers catching at all things
To bind them all about with tiny rings."

If you examine carefully the "flats" of pansies growing from mixed seed
and sold in the market-places or at local florists', you will notice
that in eight out of ten the majority of plants are of the darker
colours.

There are white varieties of almost every garden flower that blooms
between the last frost of spring and winter ice. The snowdrop of course
is white and the tiny little single English violet of brief though
unsurpassing fragrance; we have white crocuses, white hyacinths,
narcissus, lilies-of-the-valley, Iris, white rock phlox, or moss-pink,
Madonna and Japan lilies, gladiolus, white campanulas of many species,
besides the well-known Canterbury bells, white hollyhocks, larkspurs,
sweet Sultan, poppies, phloxes, and white annual as well as hardy
chrysanthemums.

Almost all the bedding plants, like the geranium, begonia, ageratum,
lobelia, etc., have white species. There are white pinks of all types,
white roses, and wherever crimson rambler is seen Madame Plantier should
be his bride; white stocks, hollyhocks, verbenas, zinnias, Japanese
anemones, Arabis or rock cress, and white fraxinella; white Lupins,
nicotiana, evening primroses, pentstemons, portulaca, primulas, vincas,
and even a whitish nasturtium, though its flame-coloured partner salvia
declines to have her ardour so modified.

Among vines we have the white wisteria, several white clematis, the
moon-flower, and other Ipomeas, many climbing and trailing roses, the
English polygonum, the star cucumber, etc., so that there is no lack of
this harmonizing and modifying colour (that is not a colour after all)
if we will but use it intelligently.

Aside from the setting of flower to flower, white has another and wider
function. As applied to the broader landscape it is not only a maker of
perspective, but it often indicates a picture and fairly pulls it from
obscurity, giving the same lifelike roundness that the single white dot
lends in portraiture to the correctly tinted but still lifeless eye.

Take for instance a wide field without groups of trees to divide and let
it be covered only with grass, no matter how green and luxuriant, and
there is a monotonous flatness, that disappears the moment the field is
blooming with daisies or snowy wild asters.

Follow the meandering line of a brook through April meadows. Where does
the eye pause with the greatest sense of