Flowers and Gardens 



its appearance and flowering, what it does 

 with itself in the winter, whether drop- 

 ping its leaves and standing bare-branched 

 like a tree or shrub, or disappearing be- 

 neath the ground like a Snowdrop or Hya- 

 cinth, or facing the cold with a tuft of 

 leaves lying close upon the earth like a 

 Foxglove. What sort of locality does it 

 love field, rock, or marsh? How does 

 it treat other plants when it encounters 

 them ? Does it twine round them like a 

 Convolvulus, creep over them like many 

 trailing plants, or bear itself erect like the 

 Buttercup? How does it wither? shab- 

 bily and untidily like the Pansy, or in the 

 neat, decorous mode of the Gentianella? 

 These and all other facts which we can 

 learn about a plant have a value in an 

 imaginative point of view ; they tell us 

 something about it, and so enable us to 

 understand it, to read its true meaning 

 and character. And we find that the sen- 

 suous qualities have more than a sensuous 

 value, for the imagination discovers that 

 they are but a symbolic language, which 

 we must receive as exponent of the hidden 

 nature of a flower, just as the features of 

 the human countenance are interpreters 

 of the mind within. 



Now the faults of gardening, against 

 98 



