THOUGHTS ON THE FLOWER GARDEN. 



173 



it, and make pleasing- returns by their 

 beauty, health, and sweetness. In this re- 

 spect a hundred thousand roses, which we 

 look at en masse, do not identify them- 

 selves in the same manner as even a very 

 small border; and hence, if the cottager's 

 mind is properly attuned, the little cottage- 

 garden may give him more real delight 

 than belongs to the owner of a thousand 

 acres. All this is so entirely nature, that 

 give me a garden well kept, however small, 

 two or three spreading trees, and a mind at 

 ease, and I defy the world.' 



Nor do we find anything contravening 

 this, in Cowley's wish that he might have 

 'a small house and large garden, few 

 friends, and many books.' Doubtless he 

 coveted neither the Bodleian nor Chats- 

 worth, and intended his garden to be 

 ' large,' only in comparison with his other 

 possession?. 



It is this limited expenditure and unlimit- 

 ed interest which a garden requires, com- 

 bined with the innocence of the amusement, 

 that renders it so great a blessing — more 

 even than to the cottager himself — to the 

 country clergyman. We must leave to ihe 

 novelist to sketch the happy party which 

 every summer's evening finds busied on 

 many an English vicarage-lawn, with their 

 trowels and watering-pots, and all the para- 

 phernalia of amateur gardeners; though 

 we may ask the utilitarian, if he would 

 deign to scan so simple a group, from the 

 superintending vicar to the water-carrying 

 schoolboy, where he would belter find de- 

 veloped ' the greatest happiness of the 

 greatest number,' than among those very 

 objects and that very occupation where 

 utility is not only banished, but condemned. 



We would have our clergy know that 

 there is no readier way to a parishioner's 

 heart — next to visiting his house, which, 

 done in health and in sickness, is the key- 

 stone of our blessed parochial system — than 

 to visit his garden, suggesting and superin- 

 tending improvements, distributing seeds, 

 and slips, and flowers, and lending or giving 

 such gardening books as would be useful 

 for his limited domain. And many a poor 

 scholar, in some obscure curacy, out of the 

 way of railroads and book-clubs, 



'In life's stillest shade reclining, 

 In desolation uurcniiiiug, 



Without a hope on earth to find 

 A mirror in un answering mind,' 



has made the moral and intellectual wilder- 

 ness in which he is cast, bloom for him in 

 his trees, and herbs, and flowers ; and if 

 unable, from the narrowness of his means 

 and situation, 



' To raise the terrace or to sink the grot,' 



has found his body refreshed and his spirits 

 lightened, in growing the salad to give a 

 relish to his simple meal, and the flower to 

 bedeck his threadbare button-hole, — ena- 

 bled by these recreations to bear up against 

 those little every-day annoyances which, 

 though hardly important enough to tax our 

 faith or our philosophy, make up in an ill- 

 regulated or unemployed mind the chief 

 ills of life. 



Pope, who professed that of all his works 

 he was most proud of his garden, said also, 

 with more nature and truth, that he ' pitied 

 that man who had completed everything in 

 his garden.' To pull down and destroy is 

 quite as natural to man as to build up and 

 improve, and this love of alteration may 

 help to account for the many changes of 

 style in gardening that have taken place. 

 The course of the seasons, the introduction 

 of new flowers, the growth of trees, will 

 always of themselves give the gardener 

 enough to do ; and if the flower-garden is 

 perfect, and there is a nook of spare ground 

 at hand, instead of extending his par- 

 terres, which cannot be kept too neat, he 

 had better devote it to an arboretum for 

 choice trees and shrubs ; or take up with 

 some one extensive class — as for a thorne- 

 ry or a pinery ; or make it a wilderness- 

 like mixture of all kinds. Such grounds 

 will not require mowing more than twice 

 or thrice in the year, and will afford much 

 pleasure, without much labor and expense. 

 If there is a little damp nook or dell, with 

 rock-work and water at command, let it by 

 all means be made a fernery, for which 

 Mr. Newman's book will supply plenty of 

 materials. 



To produce new seedling varieties of 

 one's own, by hybridizing and other mys- 

 teries of the priests of Flora, is indeed the 

 highest pleasure and the deepest esoteri- 

 cism of the art. The impregnating them 

 is to venture within the very secrets of 



