Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/403

Rh so yellow that it is orange, like sunset on fairy horns of brass. Mr. Tyndale’s picture shows a tea-house roof, gay with Bignonia grandiflora, a luxuriance of waving vine that recalled the ruins of the Residency at Lucknow to me—for Japan’s sun in July is like India’s in January. But his picture was painted at the end of June in Kyoto, as the season there is three weeks earlier than in the part I know best near Yokohama.

In June, and until late in the autumn, the wild Hydrangeas bloom in every hedgerow. Besides the bright blue which every one knows, and which is so much grown in pots with us, there is another (H. hortensia, va japonica), which is greenish-white in the centre, with purple flowers like a halo around the edge. Another (H. virens) has hard, round blue balls in the centre, with florets at the edges of pale blue fading to white, and even into a kind of rusty pink. It is rather coarse, but most effective, and in bud both are very striking looking, for the whole flower-head appears like a round green ‘snowball.’ The prettiest ones of all are the graceful, slender-stemmed, white Hydrangeas, which we were never tired of gathering, although, in spite of slitting the stems, they drooped so soon in water. These were often varied by pink florets, and in under the great Cryptomeria trees, on the paths near