310 



THE DELIGHTS OP GARDENING. 



millions of men, nnd the aliment of a com- 

 merce in fruits and flowers worth millions 

 of money. 



Thus it is, and I pray you to consider it, 

 gentlemen, that gardening, which hereto- 

 fore was only a sort of amusement or do- 

 mestic luxury, an adornment of the soil, has 

 become nowadays a new and magnificent 

 object of commerce. At a time when labor 

 fails for man, more than man fails for labor ; 

 at a time when to invent a new industry, is 

 to invent wealth, occupation, wages, life 

 itself for numberless workmen — is not this 

 a view fitted to impress the statesman, to 

 touch an intelligent minister of agriculture 

 and of commerce ? Do not, gentlemen, 

 suppose this is mere hyperbole — exaggera- 

 tion. I am just returned from the South, 

 and have seen on the shores of the Medi- 

 terranean a very considerable coasting trade 

 in flowers ! Tuscany and Genoa exported 

 to the amount of several millions of money, 

 from their flower beds. And one art gives 

 rise to another. After the art of successfully 

 cultivating flowers, has come that of gather- 

 ing and assorting them according to their 

 shades, odors, colors. This art has made 

 such progress at Genoa, for instance, has 

 been so studied there, that they can com- 

 bine, intertwine, plait, and, as it were, so 

 weave together roses, pinks, dahlias, tulips 

 and ranunculuses, that the bouquets pre- 

 pared to decorate tables on gala days — 

 bouquets often of a j^ard in circumference, 

 resemble Turkey carpets, vegetable stuffs, 

 odorous velvets, mosaics of plants. There 

 are there, vegetable weavers of flowers, who 

 turn out their perfumed fabrics ; the flower 

 girls, there as at Athens, form a class apart. 

 The bouquets which you admire, you inhale 

 at the fetes of Toulon, Marseilles, Bour- 

 deaux, and even of Paris, are woven at 

 Genoa or at Florence. Hence the gardening 

 of luxury becomes each day more and more 

 a regular business. Go on and render it 

 more perfect, and it will one day become a 

 fine art ; a school of painting, of which the 

 pallet will be the gardeii. 



But whatever be the value in the eyes of 

 the economist, of gardening industry, let us 

 frankly admit, gentlemen, that therein does 

 not lie the principal and eternal charm of 

 the Garden. No : that which in all time 



has rendered this pursuit so fascinating to 

 man, and especially to the man of sensibi- 

 lity, the student, the poet, the man of let- 

 ters, the sage, the author, the philosopher, 

 and even the warrior, is the near and inti- 

 mate relation into which it brings us with 

 nature ; the charm resulting from the study 

 of her phenomena ; the pious contemplation 

 of the wonders of vegetation ; those per- 

 petually renewed delights in beholding the 

 universal life, that dumb intelligence, sa- 

 cred and wonderful, through all vegetable 

 creation ; those indefinite limits between 

 vegetable and animal life, which seem to 

 combine all organic beings in a mysterious 

 unity, in despite of their diversities and 

 apparent separation : it is this conviction 

 of the divinity of nature, that has made me 

 sometimes even tax myself with pantheism. 

 Yet I am not a pantheist, gentlemen. No, 

 I am not like the child, who, seeing for the 

 first time a form in a mirror, takes the mir- 

 ror and the form for one, and stretches out 

 his hand to grasp the image. Nature, to 

 my eyes as to yours, is the magnificent 

 mirror, infinite, immense, in which the 

 Creator is reflected. But Nature is to me 

 so real, so intelligent, so divine, that I 

 readily understand, and without difficulty 

 excuse, him who might accuse me of con- 

 founding her with her God. 



Yes, gentlemen, it is seductions such as 

 these, which, in all time, have fixed the souls 

 of men of reflection on the spectacle of the 

 germination, flowering, and fructification of 

 the plants of the garden. Shall I cite Pytha- 

 goras, who inculcated it upon his disciples 

 as a precept of wisdom, to worship Echo 

 in her rural haunts ; SciPio, at Linterna ; 

 Diocletian, renouncing the empire of the 

 world for the cultivation of lettuce in his 

 garden at Salona ; Horace, at Tibur ; Ci- 

 cero, at Tusculuvi, or beneath his orange 

 trees at Gaeta ; Pliny, describing for pos- 

 terity the plan of his alleys bordered with 

 box, and giving a list of his fancifully 

 trimmed trees and vegetable statues ; old 

 Homer, recalling without doubt his own 

 paternal garden plot, in the description he 

 gives of the little fenced-in spot of Laertes, 

 shaded and overarched by his thirteen pear 

 trees ; Petrarch at Vaucluse, or on the hill 

 o{ Arqua ; Theocritus, beneath his Sicilian 



