62 THE FLOWER GARDEN. 



racter only we can refer to it here it has more than 

 surpassed the highest expectations entertained re- 

 specting it. The nurserymen cannot propagate it 

 fast enough by grafts and layers, and the abundance 

 of seed which the East India Company has so libe- 

 rally distributed. 



The olitory, or herb-garden, is a part of our horti- 

 culture now comparatively neglected ; and yet once 

 the culture and culling of simples was as much a 

 part of female education as the preserving and tying 

 down of " rasps and apricocks." There was not a 

 Lady Bountiful in the kingdom but made her dill- 

 tea and diet-drink from herbs of her own planting ; 

 and there is a neatness and prettiness about our 

 thyme, and sage, and mint, and marjoram, that 

 might yet, we think, transfer them from the pa- 

 tronage of the blue serge to that of the white muslin 

 apron. Lavender, and rosemary, and rue, the feathery 

 fennel, and the bright-blue borage, are all pretty 

 bushes in their way, and might have their due place 

 assigned them by the hand of beauty and taste. A 

 strip for a little herbary, halfway between the flower 

 and vegetable garden, would form a very appropriate 

 transition stratum, and might be the means, by being 

 more under the eye of the mistress, of recovering to 

 our soups and salads some of the comparatively neg- 

 lected herbs of tarragon, and French sorrel, and 

 purslane, and chervil, and dill, and clary, and others 

 whose place is now nowhere to be found but in the 

 meres of the old herbalists. This little plot should 



JL O -L 



be laid out, of course, in a simple geometric pattern ; 



