Beautiful Flower at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

There need be no question in your mind about the market for good flower photography. One of the big slide film distributors has found flower fanciers the most consistent buy ers of all among slide collectors, even though the pictures offered are strictly of specimen flowers. These cannot possibly have the same appeal as pictures of flowers grown by the buyer in his own soil. The only flower fancier who is not an eager prospect for pictures of his blooms is one who has never seen a color slide transparency of a beautiful flower projected. A close-up of a lovely flower on a screen is a sight to make anyone, flower lover or not, gasp at its beauty.

When Farrer wrote of Meconopsis his thoughts were of a very beautiful flower, a flower that had become, like edelweiss, a legend in its own horticultural time. For these blossoms are four-petaled (sometimes up to ten) poppies with many golden stamens and colors that run the gamut from sky blue to pale blue to deep purple and an occasional lavender. But they are flowers that, unfortunately, could be most politely termed as 'difficult to grow."

Honesty (Lunaria annua) is a hardy biennial that will flower and seed in the first year when started early in the season. The purple- or white-flowering plants are used in formal beds all over England. Other popular names for honesty are money plant, moonwort, or satin flower and all refer to the nearly round, silvery white replum, a parchment-like disk about 11/2 inches wide that holds the seeds. Honesty has been in cultivation for over 400 years and a Vase of the disk-topped branches is still beautiful. Plants grow to 2 1/2 feet. There is a form with variegated leaves. These plants are quite hardy and should self-seed in your garden. Space them about a foot apart in full sun.