XXVI. 



SCAELET GERANIUMS. 



WE have such a show of many-colored pelargoniums 

 in our little cottage-garden at this moment as would put 

 to shame, I verily believe, any modern bedded-out par- 

 terre in all England. For, indeed, I will frankly con- 

 fess to an old-fashioned love for natural old-fashioned 

 flowers, undistorted by the florist's art ; instead of those 

 stiff,, overgrown, unsymmetrical bosses of irregular leaves 

 which nursery-gardeners nowadays display with so much 

 pride to admiring connoisseurs as splendid double varie- 

 ties. The doubling is, of course, produced, for the most 

 part, by converting the central stamens into shapeless 

 petals, and so destroying the native symmetry and archi- 

 tectural ground-plan of the original flower. - If you look 

 into a real natural blossom, you see in it always a definite 

 and beautiful scheme, which centres on the truly essen- 

 tial parts the stamens and pistils ; but if you look into 

 a double rose, or, still worse, a double geranium, you see 

 nothing but a confused mass of wrinkled and amorphous 

 petals, without any distinct central point or any consis- 

 tent harmony of plan. It may be true, as Polixenes says 

 to Perdita, that though " this is an art which does mend 

 nature," yet " nature is made better by no mean, but 

 nature makes that mean ;" still, she makes it merely, as 

 it seems to me, by way of disease or disorganization ; 

 and I go rather with Perdita (as Shakespeare himself 

 clearly did) in declaring " I'll not put the dibble in the 

 earth to set one slip of them." No : our cottage-garden 



