[Illustration: STINGING NETTLE.]

[Illustration: WHITE DEAD NETTLE.]

Besides choosing seed from the lightest or darkest blossoms, we should
tend our plants very carefully and well, giving them plenty of good rich
soil. This would make them grow bushy and with many flowers, as we see
them in Mrs. Hammond's garden beds.

Many of our garden flowers have been produced in this way, by selecting
and improving wild flowers. Of course all flowers grow wild _somewhere_;
some in England, but many more in foreign countries, where the air is
warmer and the soil richer and better. The Pansy is a little English
wild flower with yellow, blue, and red petals. From this little flower
gardeners have produced large and beautiful pansies of many different
colours and shades of colours--white, yellow, blue, and brown. This has
been done by careful selection, just as we spoke of doing with the
wallflowers.

But if the large single-coloured pansies of which I have told you, or
Mrs. Hammond's dark brown wallflowers, were allowed to seed
themselves--that is, were allowed to drop and sow their own seed year
after year--do you know what would happen? They would gradually revert
or turn back to their original form and colour. The flowers would become
mixed in colour and less fine in size; at last they would be simple wild
flowers again.

[Illustration: PANSY.]