THE ASSOCIATIONS OF FLOWERS 247 



of some words make them impossible for poetry, and 

 the associations of some flowers are apt to exclude 

 them from the borders of imaginative gardeners. 



No doubt it is easy to be too fastidious about as- 

 sociations. A language becomes impoverished when 

 its writers will run no risks in their use of words, when 

 they are more careful not to offend a pampered taste 

 than to express their meaning at all costs; and so 

 a gardener may think too much of the associations 

 of his flowers and be concerned rather with the past 

 than with the future. For after all flowers, like words, 

 when they have been degraded by a bad use, may 

 be ennobled by a good one. The little blue Lobelia 

 does not deserve to be banished from our gardens 

 because it has been so often discordantly combined 

 with Calceolarias and Geraniums. It is not the native 

 of a ribbon border, and, no doubt, if we had only 

 seen it growing wild in South Africa we should recog- 

 nize its beauty. In this respect flowers have an ad- 

 vantage over words. They are not made by men to 

 begin with, and, therefore, cannot, like some words, 

 be condemned to ugliness and base uses from the 

 first. Some of them are so capable of transformation 

 that, in their garden forms, they may become posi- 

 tively ugly; but few, if any, are positively ugly by 

 nature. It is only misuse, and the associations of 

 misuse, that make them seem ugly to those who have 

 never seen them rightly used. 



There are some plants, especially those of the des- 

 ert, that can scarcely be rightly used in our gardens. 



