It is very fortunate that our tastes differ, otherwise in horticulture our gardens would all be alike. We should all plant Kieffer Pears, and not have such poor sorts as Bartlett occupying valuable room. So too with shrubs; we should all plant - something - well, snowballs, if you please.

Your correspondent, Virginian, seems to have been a most unfortunate man. He invested half-a-dollar in that "wonderful Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora," which he thinks sure is a disgrace to the lawn. Well, perhaps it is. I guess he is right and all the readers of the Monthly should contribute to make up the loss and enter a protest against being any longer humbugged by such trash. Why, it is no comparison to an old Barberry bush, or even an old-fashioned Snowball; for it will persist in flowering in August, when we don't want it, having plenty of Altheas.

Well, it is no use quarreling about matters of taste. If a Virginian don't like the Hydrangea, somebody else does. If we could be humbugged every day with a new plant as good as this one, it would enhance the old saying, that "it is as much pleasure to be cheated as it is to cheat."

Certainly there are unworthy novelties enough without classing the grandest of all new shrubs among them, or showing ones utter ignorance of what is truly beautiful.

Permit a stranger heartily to thank Mrs. R. B. Edson for her "Random Jottings" in the May number of the Monthly, and especially for her last paragraph. Surely people have been long enough humbugged with the wonderful Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora. Like many others, I too invested half a dollar in a little plant some years ago. It grew and bloomed abundantly. For a while the "'head" was of a pale green, then for two or three weeks white, and in that condition nearly as good as the old-fashioned Snow Ball, but soon changed to a dull, dingy, dirty pink, a disgrace to the lawn.

In moving my residence I left that behind. It was one of the few plants I had no wish to take with me. I can find no one here who thinks it nearly as good as the old Snow Ball.

I see still freely advertised another plant of which I bought a specimen some years ago, and threw away after blooming it - the Tritoma, sometimes called Red-hot Poker plant. Please let me say, if any one wants a stiff, ungraceful, coarse, glaring, vulgar-looking thing, let him get the Tritoma; it will fill the bill.

There are so many plants and flowers of charming gracefulness and exquisite beauty, why should we spend our money and give our space for things that, to say the least, are far inferior to hundreds of others?