The smallest, however, contains about a thousand seeds, and these come up, and the plants flourish, with very little care. A pretty large bed, with two or three hundred sorts in it, is a spectacle hardly surpassed in beauty by any thing in the vegetable creation.

It is an annual, of course. It is well known as a medicinal plant; but, it is not so well known as a plant from the seed of which salad oil is sometimes made! The Germans, on the Rhine, cultivate whole fields of it for this purpose. It may be as well, therefore, for us to take care not to use German Salad Oil, which, however, can with great difficulty be distinguished from oil of olives.

PRIMROSE

A beautiful little flower of a pale yellow and delicate smell. It comes very early in tile spring; and continues a good while in bloom. Of the fibrous rooted flowers it is the next to the Daisy in point of earliness. It is a universal favorite; and, in England, it comes abundantly in woods, pastures and banks. It is perennial like the Cowslip, and is propagated in the same manner. How beautiful a Long Island wood would look in April, the ground beneath the trees being decked with Primroses!

RANUNCULUS

Is a flower of the nature of the Anemone; which see. It is propagated and cultivated in the same manner. These two flowers are usually planted out in beds, where they make a very fine show.

RHODODENDRON

It never occurred, perhaps, to any American to give this fine name to the laurel with a long narrow leaf and great bunches of blue, pink, or white flowers, the balls, or pods, containing which, appear the year before the flower. It is,

however, a beautiful shrub, and not less beautiful on account of its frequently covering scores of acres of rocky sides of hills, or on account of En glish Gardeners believing that it requires bog earth (though fetched from many miles distance, at vast expense) to make it grow and blow!