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The Poet's Laurel 



CHAPTER XXV. 



FRAGRANCE. 



A MAN who makes a garden should have a heart for plants that have 

 the gift of sweetness as well as beauty of form or colour. And what a 

 mystery as well as charm — wild Roses sweet as the breath of heaven, 

 and wild Roses of repulsive odour all born of the earth-mother, and it 

 may be springing from the same spot. Flowers sweet at night and 

 scentless in the day ; flowers of evil odour at one hour and fragrant 

 at another ; plants sweet in breath of blossom, but deadly in leaf and 

 sap ; Lilies sweet as they are fair, and Lilies that must not be let 

 into the house ; with bushes in which all that is delightful in odour 

 permeates to every March-daring bud. The Grant Aliens of the day, 

 who tell us how the Dandelion sprang from the Primrose some 

 millions of years ago, would no doubt explain all these things to us, 

 or put long names to them — what Sir Richard Owen used to call 

 " conjectural biology," — but we need not care where they leave the 

 question, for to us is given this precious fragrance, happily almost 

 without effort, and as free as the clouds from man's power to spoil. 



Every fertile country has its fragrant flowers and trees ; alpine 

 meadows with Orchids and mountain Violets ; the Primrose-scented 

 woods. Honeysuckle-wreathed and May-frosted hedgerows of Britain ; 

 the Cedars of India and of the mountains of Asia Minor, with Lebanon ; 

 trees of the same stately order, perhaps still more fragrant in the 

 warmer Pacific breezes of the Rocky Mountains and Oregon, where 

 the many great Pines often spring from a carpet of fragrant Ever- 

 greens, and a thousand flowers which fade away after their early 

 bloom, and stand withered in the heat, while the tall Pines overhead 

 distil for ever their grateful odour in the sunny air. Myrtle, Rosemary, 

 and Lavender, and all the aromatic bushes and herbs clothing the little 

 capes that jut into the great sea which washes the shores of Greece, 

 Italy, Sicily, and Corsica ; garden islands scattered through vast 



