VIII APOLOGIA PRO BAMBUSIS MEIS 207 
Frenchman, differing in this from us, dreams only of the day 
when he shall return to his beloved café on the Boulevards, 
and in the meantime is content to sip his absinthe in as good 
an imitation of that same café as circumstances will admit. 
The Spaniard, the Italian, the German are better colonists 
than the Frenchman, but the idea of making a home, even for 
a short time, is peculiar to the Englishman ; and of his home 
the garden is an essential feature. In many lands are such 
gardens found, and they exercise an influence over much of 
the work that is done in this country. There are hundreds 
of gardens in England which have some feature inspired by 
the memory of the owner’s little patch of pleasure ground 
thousands of miles beyond the seas; others there are that, 
furnished with seeds of plants from some banished friend, 
reflect the descriptions given in his letters. But even when 
men have simply travelled much, keeping their eyes open to 
see what is beautiful, without of necessity remaining for any 
length of time in one place, they come back with new ideas 
insensibly acquired, pictures indelibly fixed in their minds, 
which they cannot but strive in some measure to reproduce 
when the chance occurs. And so it is that in English gardens 
and pleasaunces there is so often a memory of many lands 
enshrined amid the charms of our own scenery. 
As in all arts, so in gardening, there is a school which 
prides itself upon having purer methods than those which are 
followed by the general. To these purists it is a sin that we 
should introduce foreign trees into our pleasaunces. “England 
for the English” is their motto, and they resent the intrusion of 
any foreigner among their Elms, and Oaks, and Ashes, and 
Chestnuts. But then they should be consistent. It suits them 
