308 



THE DELIGHTS OF GARDENING. 



tify beneath your hands, I only know our 

 vme, that common stock, the tree of life, 

 which sustains us, enriches us, which has 

 borne us all in this region as so many 

 bunches of men (Smiles and applause). No: 

 I repeat it to my shame, I know horticulture 

 only by its enjoyments, its fine flowers, its 

 agreeable odors, its sensualities ; I know it 

 only by that unreflecting attraction, natural 

 and instinctive, which has led men at all 

 times, and especially men of thought and 

 of feeling, poets, writers, philosophers, 

 warriors — even courtiers themselves — to 

 delight in the sight, the contemplation and 

 the repose of gardens ; to escape thither 

 from the noise of the crowd, the gaze of the 

 multitude, the tumults of the forum ; to shut 

 themselves up under the shade of some 

 climbing shrub, within the sound of some 

 running spring, there to study the pheno- 

 mena, to listen, with the ear on the ground, 

 to the almost inaudible palpitations of the 

 earth, the murmurs of vegetable life, the 

 circulation of the sap in the branches ; and 

 to perceive springing within their own bo- 

 soms, those thoughts, those inspirations, 

 now pious, nov/ amorous, now philosophical 

 and anon heroic, which pass under the name 

 of the ge?ims of solitude ; or again to come 

 thither in the midday or the evening of life, 

 to recover strength in that moral weariness 

 which at certain periods enervates men of 

 action, as bodily fatigues sometimes over- 

 take you in the heat, or at the close of the 

 day, and compel you to repose yourself 

 beneath a tree you have been trimming, 

 upon the bed you have been digging (Ap- 

 plause). 



It is this natural taste, this sacred relation- 

 ship between man and a little plot of ground 

 more particularly appropriated, fenced in, 

 cultivated, planted, sown, watered, and 

 harvested by the hand of the gardener, 

 which, in all times, have made the story of 

 the garden a part of the story of the nation, 

 and also given it a place in the reveries as 

 to the future life, or the theogony of peoples. 

 Examine all theogonies, all religions, all 

 history, even all fable, and not one among 

 them all that does not assign man in his 

 origin to an Eden, that is, a garden : there 

 is not one that, after death, does not conduct 

 him to an Elysium ; not one that does not 



mingle the idea of a garden abounding in 

 living waters and in fruits, with the images 

 and reveries of primitive felicity on Earth, 

 of a happy hereafter in Heaven. What 

 does all this prove, gentlemen ? That the 

 imagination of man, in all its variuus dreams 

 of a paradise, has been unable to devise any 

 thing more charming than a terrestrial or a 

 celestial garden, with living waters, shades, 

 flowers, fruits, a green sod, trees, a propi- 

 tious sky, serene stars — a reciprocal friend- 

 ship, so to speak, between man and the soil. 

 So true is it, too, that in his most delicious 

 reveries, man has been able to invent no- 

 thing more perfect than nature. A spot in 

 the sunshine, protected from evil-doers, 

 embellished by vegetation, animated by the 

 birds of heaven and animals the friends of 

 man, made sacred by the work of his hands, 

 and made holy by the presence of the 

 Creator ; the habitation of the family, the 

 abode of love, of friendship, as it has been 

 for a successson of immortal generations. 

 In such an abode it is that Human Nature 

 has always placed Happiness ; and is it not 

 there you persevere in seeking it ? In seek- 

 ing it, not always perfect and unchangeable 

 as in our dreams, but in seeking it at least 

 in those brief and imperfect glimpses which 

 it has pleased God to permit us now and 

 then to obtain in this Avorld below ? 



You do well, very well, to seek it there : 

 for if your pursuit is the happiest of pursuits, 

 your science is in fact the least chimerical, 

 the least uncertain, the least disappointing, 

 the surest of all our sciences. 



Yes : for over and above all other con- 

 siderations which should bind the horticul- 

 turist to his art, there is one which has often 

 struck me, and doubtless has often struck 

 you all, and it is that of all the arts, of all 

 the sciences I should say, yours is the one 

 that most truly deserves that name, which 

 least misleads those who cultivate it, which 

 least puzzles the brain with the chimeras of 

 systems, and which carries man and con- 

 fines him most forcibly to the Truth, by its 

 details of application ; and why so ? You 

 all know why. Because your science is 

 wholly experimental and practical ; it leaves 

 nothing to speculation, to hypothesis, to 

 conjecture, to the chances of the imagina- 

 tion : there are no metaphysics of the soil ; 



