THE CANTERBURY BELL.

Campanula medium.

ANTERBURY BELLS are not so loud in their tone as might be imagined by people who are not bookish. How easy it would be to say that this common flower is figured and described in all the books, and to one who had so committed himself, how terrible would be the shock of a rejoinder to this effectthat it is neither figured nor described in any of the books. Such a rejoinder would, of course, be a trifle too daring; but it is a fact, and one of immense interest to the writer of this, that this very familiar flower has been so rarely figured or described that it will require

some searching to discover any literary recognition of it. But the fact is a key to what we may for convenience term one of the grievances of an important section of the flowery world.

The Canterbury bell is a biennial, and

therefore has no right to a place in any of the books. The biennials should make a declaration against this state of things. For the sake of an hour's amusement we have ransacked our library, and found but few allusions to the plant. The botanists say it is not British, and therefore is not one of our wild flowers. En passant, we will remark upon this, that we once found a grand plant of the blue variety growing in Bonsal Dale, Derbyshire, and that is our only acquaintance with it as a wilding. The books that treat of annuals ignore biennials, and the books that treat of perennials do the same, and so the biennials are denied benefit of clergy, and there is left to them the final but sufficient consolation that they can do very well without it. That we may not appear heathenish, it is proper to say that the clergy, philologically considered, are not necessarily employed in a sacred office-they are learned men; men who can read and write; men possessed of skill, science, and clerkship. As Blackwood remarks, "the judges were usually created out of the sacred order; and all the inferior offices were supplied by the lower clergy, which has occasioned their successors to be denominated clerks to this day."

But here is a digression. Well, we find figures of Canterbury bells in Gerard and Parkinson, but it is hard. work to make them out, because they are badly drawn and confusedly described. But it is something to say for these old masters that if we want to trace the history of such a common plant we must ask them to help us, because modern authors aim so high that their shafts fly over many common but useful and beautiful things.

It is time to say something about the cultivation of this noble campanula, and it will be consistent with the

foregoing observations that, instead of following in the wake of the blind man who made a fiddle out of his own head, we turn to the pages of a great old master for a code of instructions. In the "Abridgement" of Philip Miller's "Gardener's Dictionary," quarto, 1761, will be found the following:

"The third sort [Campanula medium] is a biennial plant, which perisheth soon after it hath ripened seeds. It grows naturally in the woods of Italy and Austria, but is cultivated in the English gardens for the beauty of its flowers. Of this sort there are the following varieties, the blue, the purple, the white, the striped, and double flowering. This hath oblong, rough, hairy leaves, which are serrated on their edges; from the centre of these, a stiff, hairy, furrowed stalk arises, about two feet high, sending out several lateral branches, which are garnished with long, narrow, hairy leaves, sawed on their edges; from the setting on of these leaves come out the footstalks of the flowers, those which are on the lower part of the stalk and the branches being four or five inches long, diminishing gradually in their length upward, and thereby form a sort of pyramid. The flowers of this kind are very large, so make a fine appearance. The seeds ripen in September, and the plants decay soon after.

"It is propagated by seeds, which must be sown in spring on an open bed of common earth, and when the plants are fit to remove, they should be transplanted into the flower-nursery, in beds six inches asunder, and the following autumn they should be transplanted into the borders of the flower-garden. As these plants decay the second year, there should be annually young ones raised to succeed them."

A note on campanulas in general may be useful. The best of them are hardy border flowers, that need no particular care, and thrive well in any ordinary good soil, but cannot endure to be starved or over-much shaded. In planting a border, preference in the first instance should be given to such sorts as C. latifolia, C. trachelium, C. glomerata, C. nobilis, C. persicifolia. For the rockery, the most important, to begin with, are C. carpathica, C. garganica, C. pumila, and C. rotundifolia. The last-named is the "harebell" of the hedgerow and the roadside and the woodland waste, which we have met with near Hayfield, in Derbyshire, in many shades of blue, white, and pink, but the plants and seeds we saved of the curious varieties lost their distinguishing characters when removed, so that when planted out on raised banks of sandy soil in the garden they all produced blue flowers.