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Flowers and Gardens of beauty, or it becomes most wholly worthless, and real gain in beauty must atone for any such loss. But why is the gardener in such risk of learning to dis- like the special characters of the unculti- vated flower ? Simply because his labour is for the most part directed to efface them, to supplant that style of beauty by the opposite. Yet it is not always so, as we see from the hothouse Orchids. Note 2 The gardener, then, is an artist who interprets Nature by showing her full capabilities, by carrying out any beautiful tendency whatsoever of a plant to its fullest consummation. It is a work not only of evolution, but of change. He sometimes appears principally to be en- larging the native form, and displaying it to better advantage ; but he frequently must alter it altogether, as in the double flowers, and replace it by something new. His creations are, therefore, often neces- sarily very one-sided, and apt to be much influenced by caprices of novelty and fancy, so that it is well to counterbalance their effect upon the mind by an habitual study of wild plants. But it is only when 166

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On the Withering of Plants The Snowdrop is thus extinguished before the Crocus, and the Crocus before the after flowers. The scene must never be vacant, the old must remain with us till the new is well unfolded ; but we care little for the last lingering blossoms, and even if they were as lovely as ever, they would remain as a thing of a bygone day, in which our interest has ceased. Now if there were no withering, and the petals continued perfect till they fell from the stalk, a flower would contrast with its successors at a great disadvan- tage — we should feel that it was being outshone by them. But Nature will not permit her favourites to be dishonoured in this way, and she quietly withdraws them from the rivalry. When we have seen them as long as she thinks good to permit, she lays their beauty waste. But before this is done, a close observer will notice that the plant's most subtle and exquisite attractions have been stolen away imperceptibly, so that even whilst there is no sign of actual decay, the power of enchantment is lost, and that which finally palls upon our memory is not the flower, but the flower robbed of its soul, a mere copy of the great original masterpiece. And to carry out this 199

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EDITOR'S PREFACE NEARLY thirty years have passed since this book was published. At its iirst appearance it was fully appreciated by a few persons, among whom Mr. Bright, the author of a '■'A Year in a Lancashire Garden" may be specially mentioned ; but it has long been out of print and is now very scarce, so that the time for a second edition seems to have fully come. For it is not a book that should be buried or forgotten. In many respects it stands quite alone among the numberless books on gardening and flowers, for it takes a special line of its own, in which it really remains supreme ; a few authors have touched upon the same line, but only in a slight sketchy way as a small part of the larger subjects on which they were writing, and a few have attempted some feeble imitations of the book and have failed signally.

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Biography twenty-one, and from a large number of older candidates, as surgeon to the Not- tingham Union, a post which he held till a short time before his death. He died at Nottingham, August 28, 1869. He was a born artist and a born natu- ralist. As an artist he made a special study of the old masters of the Italian and Dutch schools, and he was known from his early youth as a very clever draughtsman ; and his later botanical drawings were so exact, and yet so artistic, that they won the warm appre- ciation of Ruskin. As a naturalist he was noted for his close observation and patience in research, and for his accuracy in the minutest par- ticulars, to which he attached a value which casual observers overlooked. His love of flowers and botany was indeed hereditary, for on his mother's side he was descended from Dr. John Fothergill, F.R.S. (1712-1780), who was in his day one of the most noted English botanists ; he had a garden at Upton, West Ham, which had a European reputation, and was a correspondent of Linnaeus. On XVlll

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Flowers and Gardens chiefly consists in its being a true reading of nature. Let us look, for instance, at just one of these unimportant accidents of structure, as some utilitarians would consider them, though perhaps as necessary to the well- being of the plant as they unquestionably are to its loveliness. See how the whole make of the flower contributes to its drop- like character,^ the most essential feature in the expression. Now, if one simple change were made, this character would be wholly lost. There are plenty of drooping flowers amongst the Liliacese. Suppose that the Snowdrop had been a Liliaceous instead of an Amaryllidaceous plant. The two orders so nearly resemble each other that no visible change would be needed except this one — that the green drop-like ovary would be contained within the corolla, instead of being outside it. And thus the form of the double drop would be lost, for the corolla would spring directly from the flower-stalk. We may also notice, when the flower is closed and the fitness of Its name most manifestly seen, how the white corolla, so narrow where it leaves ' [The drop in Snowdrop is not a drop of water {gutia), but IS the old name for a pendent jewel, especially an ear- ring— H. N. E.] i6

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The Yellow Crocus with the rays falling straight upon it. Do this with a number of specimens of different ages, on dull days and on fine ones, and you will not only discover new beauties, but will learn the great difficulty of rightly describing flower- colour. Even Mr. Ruskin has fallen into error here. He attacks O. W. Holmes for the couplet — "The spendthrift Crocus, thrusting through the mould, Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold." The lines are evidently faulty enough. The Crocus "naked and shivering"! We might as well say that the flames are shivering on the wintry hearth, for warmth is the very essence of the flower. But to assert that the Crocus is not golden, but saffron, is hypercritical ; and, moreover, scarcely true. It is saffron in a dull light, and in a light still duller it may be almost brown. But what is it when placed in the unclouded sunshine, the only time when the flower is fairly describable as a cup ? What can we say positively about the colour then ? The petals are orange here and yellow there, and everywhere display that shifting glance which we have already described 25

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Flowers and Gardens but clean and fresh as if new-bathed in milk, and carrying us away to thoughts of dairies, flocks, and pasturage, and the manners of a simple primitive time, some golden age of shepherd-life long since gone by. And this is one of the most intense delights of flowers. They afford such a perfect escape from our artificial nineteenth-century way of living, appear- ing just such a simple unsophisticated race of creatures as we might meet with in a fairy tale. All the restless, uncomfortable passions of constitutions sapped by disease, the vices generated in close-pressed hot- beds of humanity, the anxieties and frauds of the commercial world, seem wholly to have passed away, and we have come into a region where the inhabitants are simple and good, where evil is rare and slight, and not the fast clinging thing we know. And it does npt matter at all that the precise historian tells us there never was a golden shepherd age like that which we are visioning. We know well enough that it is so. We know that it supposes incompatible advantages — the good of all seasons in one. But our golden age is real, for it exists now, and in these flowers. And even if we chance to live where rural simplicity is rare, we 46

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The Cowslip they are fragrant, and the fragrance shapes the ambiguous suggestion, so that we can view them with unmixed pleasure. And it is the same with the glands be- neath the leaves of many plants, as, for instance, those of the common black cur- rant. In themselves they can scarcely be considered as beautiful, but the eye takes delight in them from the moment we discover that they are scented. There is something of the same sort again in the Primrose. That flower may justly be described as pale, as if from long lingering beneath the shadows of the woods, shut out from light and air ; and at this Shake- speare has gently and delicately hinted in the lines which compare it to a girl not as yet consumptive, but gifted with that too early loveliness which will even- tually ripen into the disease — "Pale primroses. Which die unmarried ere they may behold Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady Most incident to maids." Yet we cannot call even the Primrose " wan." That would mean that it had a sickly expression, a thing which is at all times painful and revolting, and would be especially so in a flower. And the 51

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Flowers and Gardens centre. There is first the little red-fringed cup, yellow within, but green in the deep- est part of it. And see how this continues the tube through the flower, and how its torn edges seem to radiate, and how its concavity opposes the broad convexity of the flower face. Then how beautifully the petals bend back from it, folding upon themselves in those delicious curves, so as to lay marked emphasis upon the central line, and each of them tipped at the ex- tremity with a small point {mucro). But wherein lies the special attractive- ness of this Narcissus ? Is it not in the exquisite way in which cold and heat are brought together there, the former of course predominating ; — in the blending of that scarlet fire and rich delicious fra- grance — all fragrance, as I have said, being indicative of warmth — with the snowy cool- ness and purity ? Such union of opposite and apparently incompatible beauties is always intensely pleasurable. We experi- ence this in looking at the snow on Alpine heights, whilst we ourselves lie warm in the summer heat of the valley. And the red of the Narcissus is specially delightful, because it is such a mere streak, and is yet so brilliantly contrasted by the snow around it, and is so well supported on the 76

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Flowers and Gardens the unnatural posture spoils its beauty less than in the Snowdrop. Now this shows a form less specialised, less adapted, that is, to one particular set of circumstances, and so perhaps indicates a lower kind of beauty. Evidently, at any rate, this sen- suous gain of the Snowflake in the broad contrast of green and white has necessi- tated a certain loss. The delicacy of outline in the corolla of the Snowdrop is gone, to be replaced by a simple bell- shape, only varied near the margin where the petal-tips curve outwards. But if the plant has lost in delicacy, it has gained in other ways. The whole cast of it strikes us as pre-eminently fair and noble. We feel this especially in the tallness of the stems and leaves, which show a most graceful example of well-proportioned height ; and, also, in the dropping of the large snowy flowers, in which there is less of humility than of the subdued yet digni- fied bearing of some tall and beautiful princess of olden days when standing in the presence of a king. Here sensuousness, then, has a high imaginative value. It is in great part the very purity of the white which makes the plant so noble. The form of the pedicels is, in the main, like what we have in the 80

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XII The Daffodil IN the Snowdrop, Snowflake, and many- similar plants, the spathe or sheath out of which the flower arises has a fresh leafy aspect, and shows no symptom of decay till the plant has shed its blossom. Again, in the Calla, or Arum Lily of the greenhouses, and our own native Cuckoo- Pint (^Arum macula- turn), this spathe is so largely developed as to constitute the most striking beauty of the flower. Now there are certain kinds of Narcissus, as the Daffodil and Poet's Narcissus (popularly called " Phea- sant's Eye "), which seem meant to attract us by an especial freshness. In the Daffodil, for instance, the leaves and stem are of a full glaucous green, a colour not only cool and refreshing in itself, but strongly suggestive of water, the most apparent source of freshness, and constituting a most delicious ground- 85

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Flowers and Gardens sun shining through the latter gave it a transparency which made it glow like wine. I would sooner have had those two neglected flowers than all the exhi- bition. But there is a second way, more im- portant even than the last, in which the modern system tends to injure a healthy taste for flowers — I allude to the custom of putting out plants in the beds just for the period of bloom, and then removing them, as if both before and after flower- ing they were destitute of interest. A garden is, in fact, no longer the home of plants, where all ages, the young, the mature, and the decayed, mix freely and in easy dress. It has degenerated into a mere assembly-room for brilliant parties, where childhood and age are both alike out of place. In some gardens the system is carried out plainly and unaffectedly. There are no spring flowers at all worth mentioning, but sufficiency of shrubs and evergreens to make the place look neat; and we see the main space occupied by large bare beds, which will receive the summer visitors when they come. About the be- ginning of May, these half-hardy plants are put in, and miserably uninteresting they look for a while, till at length they

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Faults in Gardening Note i The best plants for gardens are Euro- pean or quasi-European species, because these are the most congenial to our soil and climate, and the most perfectly in- telligible to us in their habits and mode of growth. But how many people can have any clear idea as to what Geraniums or Calceolarias would look like, or try to do, where they grow wild and free? I myself continually feel, as in the case of the Chinese Primrose, that such ignorance is a great bar to my enjoyment of the flower, and the knowledge is scarcely to be got from books. Yet it must always be distinctly borne in mind that Art is not Nature. Let people create beauty howsoever they please, and of whatsoever materials, we must not blame them unless we can show that their method is in- jurious. But I do blame the modern taste as tyrannous and exclusive, casting out just the plants which should be dearest to us, to make room for those which can never come so near to heart. Think of gardeners stigmatising, as I am told is the case, the Lilac and Laburnum as plebeian ! — the Laburnum, the fair- 119

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