THE BOOK OF THE LILY 



CHAPTER I 



INTRODUCTORY 



" Give me swift transportance to those fields 

 Where I may wallow in the Lily beds." TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 



" To gild refined gold, to paint the Lily, 

 To throw a perfume on the Violet 



Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." KING JOHN. 



IN many of his writings Shakespeare alludes to the Lily 

 as the embodiment of purity and loveliness, and we to- 

 day still echo the praises of the queenly flower which so 

 charmed the master of song, doubtless having in his mind 

 the White Madonna Lily, which for centuries has been 

 a joy and a treasure of English gardens, great and small. 



The Lilies share with the Irises the distinction of being 

 written about in separate handbooks of this Series. They 

 are worthy of it, for are they not among the most beauti- 

 ful denizens of our gardens ? 



To write a book all about the Lily is an undertaking 

 that even the most experienced grower of Lilies would 

 approach with some feeling of diffidence, knowing, as he 

 does full well, that no man can know all about them and 

 of their behaviour in cultivation, under the varied con- 

 ditions of climate that inevitably occur even in these our 

 small British Islands. Neither is there in any part of 

 the world any one garden where all the kinds of Lilies 

 thrive to perfection, as that is an ideal never to be realised, 



A 



