CHAPTER I 



INTRODUCTION 



TOVE of flowers and all things green and 

 growing is with many men and women 

 a passion so strong that it often seems to be a 

 sort of primal instinct, coming down through 

 generation after generation, from the first man 

 who was put into a garden "to dress it and to 

 keep it." People whose lives, and those of 

 their parents before them, have been spent in 

 dingy tenements, and whose only garden is a 

 rickety soap-box high up on a fire-escape, share 

 this love, which must have a plant to tend, 

 with those whose gardens cover acres and 

 whose plants have been gathered from all the 

 countries of the world. How often in summer, 

 when called to town, and when driving through 

 the squalid streets to the ferries or riding on 

 the elevated road, one sees these gardens of 



3 



