COUNTRY LIFE
November Blooms A neighbour of mine has Cultivated the habit of making a census of flowers in the first week of November. The list usually contains about fifty names. This November all the records should be easily broken. The plants which belong to spring, summer, autumn and winter are all in blossom together. We have an epitome of the seasons. The earliest bush in the garden belonging properly to January or early February is viburnum fragrans. It has just lost its empurpled leaves. In their stead have appeared a number of little humble flowers, very white and already very fragrant. It is one of the shrubs one cannot dispense with, unless you are wholly prejudiced in favour of viburnum cartesii, which is a little later and perhaps a more lusty blossomer. It is one of the few rivals to chimon- anthus. Within five yards of this premature fragrance is a bush of ceanothus (Gloire de Versailles) which we expect to flower in full summer. It boasts a real mass of blossom—now ; and the queer ratafia-like smell is strong. That useful if, in some eyes, vulgar spring plant, the yellow alyssum is in thick flower. As a rule such belated blossoms are comparatively few and small. The Penzance briars, whose only fault is a short flowering season, have a number of blossoms ; and very strange the fresh pink flowers look in the midst of a mass of the scarlet berries proper to the season.
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