FRAGRANCE. Ig? 



apart from their gift of beauty, living associations and beautiful 

 thoughts for ever famous in human story. 



It is not only odours of trees and flowers known to all we have 

 to think of, but also many delicate ones, less known, perhaps, by 

 reason of the blossoms that give them being without showy colour, 

 as the wild Vine, the Sweet Vernal, Lemon, and other grasses. And 

 among these modest flowers there are none more delicate in odour 

 than the blossoms of the common white Willow, the yellow-twigged 

 and the other Willows of Britain and Northern Europe, which are all 

 the more grateful in air coming to us 



O'er the northern moorland, o'er the northern foam. 



What is the lesson these sweet flowers have for us ? They tell us 

 if there were no other flowers to tell us that a garden should be a 



living thing; its life not only fair in form and 



What fragrance lovely in colour, but in its breath and essence 



teaches. coming from the Divine. They tell us that the 



very common attempt to conform their fair lives 

 into tile or other patterns, to clip or set them out as so much mere 

 colour of the paper-stainer or carpet-maker, is to degrade them and 

 make our gardens ugly and ridiculous, from the point of view of 

 Nature and of true art. Yet many of these treasures for the open 

 garden have been shut out of our thoughts owing to the exclusion 

 of almost everything that did not make showy colour and lend itself 

 to crude ways of setting out flowers. 



Of the many things that should be thought of in the making of a 

 garden to live in, this of fragrance is one of the first. And, happily, 

 among every class of flowers which may adorn our open-air gardens 

 there are fragrant things to be found. Apart from the groups of 

 plants in which all, or nearly all, are fragrant, as in Roses, the annual 

 and biennial flowers of our gardens are rich in fragrance Stocks, 

 Mignonette, Sweet Peas, Sweet Sultan, Wallflowers, double Rockets, 

 Sweet Scabious, and many others. These, among the most easily 

 raised of plants, may be enjoyed by the poorest cottage gardeners. 

 The garden borders of hardy flowers bear for us odours as precious 

 as any breath of tropical Orchid, from the Lily-of the- Valley to the 

 Carnation, this last yielding, perhaps, the mobt grateful fragrance of 

 all the flowering host in our garden land. In these borders are 

 things sweeter than words may tell of Woodruff, Balm, Pinks, 

 Violets, garden Primroses, Polyanthuses, Day and other Lilies, 

 early Iris, Narcissus, Evening Primroses, Mezereon, and Pansies 

 delicate in their sweetness. 



No one may be richer in fragrance than the wise man who plants 

 hardy shrubs and flowering trees Magnolia, May, Daphne, Lilac, 



