THE ASSOCIATIONS OF FLOWERS 



though meadows are full of it in Switzerland, we have 

 no form of it that grows wild in our fields. 



There are many plants that have not been de- 

 veloped by the florists which we think of only as gar- 

 den plants because we have never seen them growing 

 wild. We could scarcely imagine, for instance, a 

 wild Madonna Lily. The very name, which, by- 

 the-by, is quite modern, associates it not only with 

 man, but with the art of man. It appears in many 

 famous pictures of the Virgin, from the Annunciation 

 of Fra Angelico to that of Rossetti. But nowhere 

 perhaps is it so beautifully used as in Lippo Lippi's 

 Coronation, where the white flowers shine above the 

 attendant angels against the blue background. 



These Lilies are just the same as those which grow 

 in our gardens now; but few of our modern Roses 

 are much like those which are blown by Zephyrus 

 upon Botticelli's new risen Venus. They are small 

 and rather prim in the arrangement of their petals. 

 They have no thorns, and if Botticelli painted them 

 from a particular model it may have been from the 

 thornless Rose described by Parkinson. But to judge 

 by most old pictures of Roses primness was once con- 

 sidered a virtue in them as in Dahlias and Columbines. 

 Perhaps now we have gone too far the other way. 

 At any rate, our modern Roses have utterly out- 

 grown all the old artistic associations of the flower; 

 and the Tudor Rose does not seem to belong to our 

 gardens like the Fleur-de-lys. The new Roses, whether 

 hybrid perpetuals or teas or ramblers, have yet to 



