THE CARNATION, 433 
varieties are produced from seeds saved from the very best named double 
varieties. If left to nature, the single-flowered varieties would produce 
seed most freely, and the double forms would drop out of existence. We 
do not read much about the carnation until the reign of Queen Elizabeth. 
William Turner published a Herbal about 1550, which was dedicated to 
Queen Elizabeth. In Turner’s time the flowers were much varied in 
colour, and had taken on the double form. The author adds that they were 
“made pleasant and sweet with the labours and wit of men and not by 
nature.” This is conclusive evidence that gardeners were cultivating and 
improving the carnation about the middle of the sixteenth century. How 
early we can only conjecture. Shakespere alludes to the carnation in The 
Winter's Tale, and it was evidently surmised that the flowers had been . 
produced by hybridisation, and on this account Perdita refused to grow 
them. The dialogue in The Winter’s Tale between Polixenes and 
Perdita, when she was distributing the flowers at the sheep-shearing, “is 
a most beautiful and striking touch of individual character,’ and shows 
the great knowledge Shakespere had of gardening. Perdita says : 
Sir, the year growing ancient, 
Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth 
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers 0’ the season 
Are our carnations, and streaked gillyflowers, 
Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind 
Our rustic garden’s barren ; and I care not 
To get slips of them. 
POLIXENES : f Wherefore, gentle maiden, 
Do you neglect them ? 
PERDITA : For I have heard it said, 
There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares 
With great creating nature. 
POLIXENES : Say, there be; 
Yet nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean: so, o’er that art, 
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry 
A gentler scion to the wildest stock ; 
And make conceive a bark of baser kind 
By bud of nobler race: This is an art 
Which does mend nature,—change it rather ; but 
The art itself is nature. 
PERDITA : So it is. 
* Porrxenrs: Then make your garden rich in gillyflowers, 
And do not call them bastards. 
PERDITA : Pll not put 
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them : 
No more than, were I painted, I would wish 
This youth should say, ’twere well. : 
From this, at all events, we know that the carnation was carefully 
cultivated in this country in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth 
centuries, but certainly not with such care and scientific accuracy as it is 
being cultivated at the beginning of the twentieth. For garden purposes 
the carnation is divided into two classes, the carnation and picotee. The 
picotee is merely a colour variety of the carnation, but is distinguished 
from it in having a ground colour of white or yellow with a narrow 
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