52 THE FLOWER GARDEN. 



make up the perfection of the Flower-gardener. A 

 very different spirit is now abroad from that when 

 Sir W. Temple wrote " I will not enter upon any 

 account of flowers, having only pleased myself with 

 seeing or smelling them, and not troubled myself 

 with the care, which is more the lady's part than 

 the man's, but the success is wholly with the 

 gardener." Now not only have we beat the old 

 herbalists, kitchen-gardeners, and botanists on their 

 own ground for " the leaf," " the root," and " the 

 weed," tea potatoes tobacco* were either un- 

 known or hardly noticed by the earlier writers on 

 these very subjects but governments, and com- 

 panies, and societies, vie with men of science, and 

 commerce, and wealth, in gladdening our British 

 gardens with a new flower. Without dwelling on 

 the dahlia, brought into fashion by Lady Holland in 

 1804, and the pansies first patronised and hybridized 

 by Lady Mary Monk in 1812, what treasures have 

 the last few years added to our gardens in the 

 splendid colours of the petunias, calceolarias, lobelias, 

 phloxes, tropoeolums, and verbenas the azure cle- 

 matis the blue salvia the fulgent fuchsia ! What 

 gorgeous masses of geraniums, the " Orange-bo\en " 



* Parkinson, in 1629, says only of tobacco " With us it is 

 cherished as well for the medicinal qualities as for the beauty of its 

 flowers;" not a word of smoking. Gerarde, in 1633, though he 

 knows " the dry leaves are us^d to be taken in a pipe, set on fire, and 

 suckt into the stomache, and thrust forth againe at the nosthrils," yet 

 "commends the syrup, above this fume or smoky medicine." Of the 

 potato, he mentions its being " a meat for pleasure " as secondary to 

 its " temperature and vertues ;" and that its " too frequent use causeth 

 the leprosie." Neither of them, of course, mentions "tea." 



