WINTER GARDEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 114, 17 May 1933, Page 9

WINTER GARDEN.

RIOT OF COLOUR. STATELY CHRYSANTHEMUMS. FERNS AND ORCHIDS. It was Kipling who sang of the glory of tie garden —not the garden at any, one season of the year, but merely an English garden. To go to the winter! gardens at the Domain just at this season I is to make one wish for the voice of a Kipling to sing of the beauties of the riot of colour in one of the hothouses there. The hothouse, for its whole length, perhaps 100 feet, ie a gorgeous mass of colour, of every, shade describable; some, indeed, are indescribable, j and would be even by women who are adept at choosing materials for frocks. It is, of course, the time of the year for chrysanthemums. They are there in their hundrede. They stand, stiff and formal, slender of stem, dark and sombre of foliage, and crowned with a glory which even a Turner could never reproduce on canvas. In 6ome flowers, one notices the leaves and the plant; in a chrysanthemum one sees only the bloom, petals curving inward like a thousand tapering, sensitive fingers. l Stately bronze gold heads seem to turn in stiff converse to a crown of delicate heliotrope; groups of whites gather to gaze yonder at a companion which is neither heliotrope nor mauve nor lilac. They are like the stately ladies of the time of Anne, proper, distant, and unapproachable.

That is one kind of chrysanthemum. There is another, the cascade chrysanthemum, the flowers of which fall for all the world like their name. They are friendly; one sees a fall not of water but of flower stars.

The room is exotic. Hanging headhigh are baskets of ferns, of all manner of ferae, of which the names do not matter because one could never remember them or pronounce them. Delicate little bush ferns peep out from under the tables of flowers. They hang over the walk and hide its edges. Palms are dotted here And there, One 5& 15 years

old and more than that many feet high. The room is an orderly confusion. The growth of the troj>ical jungle is brought there for your pleasure. Bizarre orchids uprear their queer heads. They are not like flowers, but like spiders. Well might they have grown in dank places where enakes live.

In the centre is a rock pool over which is a dome-shaped rockery, simply a mass of ferns. In the pool, cool and mysterious, goldfish hang, motionless, like figures painted on a screen. Parents como to admire the loveliness of the garden. Their little children crouch, big-eyed and and watch the little fish, which stay to he watched. The whole is a beautiful picture; the little children give, the contrast.