248 Old Time Gardens 



it is happy work. Jeered at in his early life by 

 fools for his wood-roving tastes, he has now the 

 pleasure and honor of supplying wild flowers to 

 our public schools, and being the authority to whom 

 scholars and teachers refer in vexed questions of 

 botany. 



I think the various tints allied to purple are the 

 most difficult to define and describe of any in the 

 garden. To begin with, all these pinky-purple, 

 these arethusa tints are nameless ; perhaps orchid 

 color is as good a name as any. Many deem purple 

 and violet precisely the same. Lavender has much 

 gray in its tint. Miss Jekyll deems mauve and 

 lilac the same ; to me lilac is much pinker, much 

 more delicate. Is heliotrope a pale bluish purple ? 

 Some call it a blue faintly tinged with red. Then 

 there are the orchid tints, which have more pink 

 than blue. It is a curious fact that, with all these 

 allied tints which come from the union of blue 

 with red, the color name comes from a flower 

 name. Violet, lavender, lilac, heliotrope, orchid, 

 are examples ; each is an exact tint. Rose and 

 pink are color names from flowers, and flowers 

 of much variety of colors, but the tint name is 

 unvarying. 



Edward de Goncourt, of all writers on flowers and 

 gardens, seems to have been most frankly pleased 

 with the artificial side of the gardener's art. He 

 viewed the garden with the eye of a colorist, setting 

 a palette of varied greens from the deep tones of the 

 evergreens, the Junipers and Cryptomerias through 

 the variegated Hollies, Privets and Spindle trees ; 



