FOREWORDS TO NEW EDITION. 



fruitful of the greatest evil to artistic gardening. The way of 

 arranging a garden like a book, and a very ugly book, as in 

 the French botanic gardens (Caen, Angers, Rouen), in which one 

 sees a sea of showy labels, where one might look for the life and 

 peace of a garden, is a blinding obstacle to beautiful gardening, 

 and the Garden of Plants, in Paris, may be cited as one having 

 had for ages a disastrous effect in the gardening of France. 

 It is the spirit of natural beauty we should seek to win into the 

 garden, and so get away from the set patterns on the one hand, 

 and labelled " dots " on the other. 



English names are given where possible — as it is best to speak 

 of things growing about our doors in our own tongue, and the practice 

 of using in conversation long Latin names, a growth of our own 

 century, has done infinite harm to gardening in shutting out people 

 who have a heart for a garden, but none for the Latin of the gardener. 

 There is no more need to speak of the plants in our gardens by their 

 Latin names than to speak of the dove or the rabbit by Latin names, 

 and where we introduce plants that have no good English names we 

 must make them as well as we may. Old English books like Gerard 

 were rich in English names, and we should follow their ways and 

 be ashamed to use for things in the garden a strange tongue — dog 

 Latin, or as it may be. Every plant grown in gardens should have an 

 English name, among the many reasons for this being the frequent 

 changes that Latin names undergo in the breaking down of the 

 characters which are supposed to separate genera. For instance. 

 Azalea and Rhododendron are now one genus ; such changes are 

 even more troublesome when they occur in less well-known plants ; 

 and one of the most beautiful plants of our gardens, the Irish 

 Heath (Daboecia, now Boretta), will not be found now by its hitherto 

 recorded name in the London Catalogue of British Plants. But if 

 we have a good English name, these ceaseless botanical changes are 

 of less consequence. It is impossible for gardeners and nurserymen 

 to keep up with such changes, not always indeed accepted even by 

 botanists themselves. The fact that in speaking of plants we use 

 English names does not in the least prevent us from using the Latin 

 name in its right place, when we have need to do so. The systematic 

 nomenclature followed is that of the Kew list, wherever use does not 

 compel us to adhere to old names like Azalea. 



For the second part of this book the storehouse of information 

 in The Garden has been taken advantage of, but articles have been 



