soil. This would make them grow bushy and with many flowers, as we see
them in Mrs. Hammond's garden beds.

Many of our garden flowers have been produced in this way, by selecting
and improving wild flowers. Of course all flowers grow wild _somewhere_;
some in England, but many more in foreign countries, where the air is
warmer and the soil richer and better. The Pansy is a little English
wild flower with yellow, blue, and red petals. From this little flower
gardeners have produced large and beautiful pansies of many different
colours and shades of colours--white, yellow, blue, and brown. This has
been done by careful selection, just as we spoke of doing with the
wallflowers.

But if the large single-coloured pansies of which I have told you, or
Mrs. Hammond's dark brown wallflowers, were allowed to seed
themselves--that is, were allowed to drop and sow their own seed year
after year--do you know what would happen? They would gradually revert
or turn back to their original form and colour. The flowers would become
mixed in colour and less fine in size; at last they would be simple wild
flowers again.

[Illustration: PANSY.]

Now it is June, and the blossoms of the Wallflower have faded and
fallen. The old wall is, however, growing gay with another plant--the
Red Valerian. We must be careful to remember that it is the Red
Valerian, for there are other valerians. There is the Great Valerian
which does not grow on walls or rocks, but in damp and shady places; its
flowers are pale pink.

The blossoms of the Red Valerian on the wall are bright crimson, and
they grow in rows on small stems which spring from a stout stalk a foot
or two in height. Each blossom of five petals forms a little tube or
corolla. The base or foot of each little tube appears as a point on the
under side of the flower stem; the Red Valerian, like the Violet, is a
spurred flower.

The leaves are long and pointed, and they grow in pairs, on opposite
sides of the stalk. Sometimes the edges of the leaves are quite smooth;
sometimes they are serrated, or toothed, like the edge of a saw. If we
pulled a plant of Red Valerian from the wall we should find the roots
very long and branching; they need to be so, for the plant often grows
on rocks and other places where it is exposed to wind. If the roots had
not a firm hold the tall stems laden with blossoms might be blown down.

The Red Valerian flowers all through the summer. Its clusters of crimson
flow