134 Old Time Gardens 



For several years the first blossom of the new 

 year in our garden was neither the Snowdrop nor 

 Crocus, but the Ladies' Delight, that laughing, 

 speaking little garden face, which is not really a 

 spring flower, it is a stray from summer; but it is 

 such a shrewd, intelligent little creature that it readily 

 found out that spring was here ere man or other 

 flowers knew it. This dear little primitive of the 

 Pansy tribe has become wonderfully scarce save in 

 cherished old gardens like those of Salem, where I 

 saw this year a space thirty feet long and several feet 

 wide, under flowering shrubs and bushes, wholly 

 covered with the everyday, homely little blooms of 

 Ladies' Delights. They have the party-colored 

 petal of the existing strain of English Pansies, dis- 

 tinct from the French and German Pansies, and I 

 doubt not are the descendants of the cherished 

 garden children of the English settlers. Gerarde 

 describes this little English Pansy or Heartsease in 

 1587 under the name of Viola tricolor : 



" The flouers in form and figure like the Violet, and for 

 the most part of the same Bignesse, of three sundry colours, 

 purple, yellow and white or blew, by reason of the beauty 

 and braverie of which colours they are very pleasing to the 

 eye, for smel they have little or none." 



In Breck's Book of Flower -j, 1851, is the first 

 printed reference I find to the flower under the 

 name Ladies' Delight. In my childhood I never 

 heard it called aught else ; but it has a score of folk 

 names, all testifying to an affectionate intimacy : 

 Bird's-eye; Garden-gate ; Johnny-jump-up ; None- 



