90 THE FLOWER GARDEX. 



breathed poetry from their very birth, and needed not the 

 foreign aid of ornament to attract the homage of the bard. 

 But what poetaster will adventure to sing the glories of a 

 modern ball-room bouquet? Who shall build lofty verse 

 with such materials as " polypodium aspenifolimn," "me- 

 sembryanthemum pinnatifidum," and " cardiospermum hali- 

 cacabum," and other graces of our gardens, 



" quas versu dicere non est" ? 



Even prose will hardly endure such intruders, and I know 

 no author but Miss Mitford who has even attempted, with 

 the least success, to render classic the names of our modem 

 importations. 



Nor is it in names, only that much of the poetry of our 

 garden has departed. In the flowers themselves we have 

 too often made a change for the worse. What shall we 

 say of the taste that has discarded the hollyhock the only 

 landscape-flower we possess ? Do the gaudy hues of the 

 stiff and formal dahlia recompense for the loss of its bold 

 clusters of flowers, breaking the horizon with an obelisk of 

 colour ? Why has the painter been so long in reclaiming 

 his own ? By far the finest effect that combined art and 

 nature ever produced in gardening were those fine masses 

 of many-coloured hollyhocks clustered round a weather- 

 tinted vase, such as Sir Joshua delighted to place in the 

 wings of his pictures. And what more magnificent than 

 a long avenue of these floral giants, the double and the 

 single, not too straightly tied, backed by a dark thick 

 hedge of old-fashioned yew? Yet how seldom, now-a- 

 days, is either of these sights to be seen ! The dahlia has 

 banished the hollyhock, with its old friend, the sunflower, 

 into the cottage garden, where it still flanks the little walk 

 that leads from the wicket to the porch not the only in- 



