The lilacs, white and purple, were in flower, amid scarlet rhododendrons and branching pink and yellow tree-azaleas.

Banks of black-eyed Susans with outdoor ferns, bowers of snowy dogwood in season and the fluffy wild pink azalea are very decorative, and so are the spring and early summer shrubs: syringa, deutzia, flowering almond and Japanese snowball.

In one of the closest, most filthy courts we see, in a garret window, a white azalea full of flowers, pure as the untrodden snow.

But with June comes the most exquisite of our New England wild-flowers, the arethusa, or swamp-pink, as it is often styled, to the great confusion of its delicate, high-born nature with the great, vulgar, flaunting azalea.