^ The Scented Qarden (j£ 



painfully well-arranged effort from a florist's shop ? I 

 wonder what happens to flowers in florists' shops, for 

 somehow they invariably look entirely different from their 

 own kind growing in the garden. Personally they always 

 give me the uncomfortable feeling that I am with com- 

 plete strangers. I sometimes think it would be fun just 

 for a week or so to have a barrow loaded with real country 

 bunches of all the sweet-smelling old-fashioned flowers so 

 difficult to buy in any city, and to sell them in one of the 

 London streets or preferably in one of the few remaining 

 old-time squares — Edwardes Square in Kensington, for 

 instance. But the nosegays would have to be real country 

 bunches, not the imitations of these one sometimes sees, 

 and no two bunches would be alike. I don't think much 

 would be left on the barrow by the end of each day ! 

 For it is the flowers Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare 

 loved which still hold first place in our affections. They 

 are the flowers, too, which figure so largely in the books 

 which everyone cherishes, not only for their intrinsic 

 beauty, but because they are so redolent of the country 

 and country gardens — books such as Mrs. Ewing's Mary's 

 Meadow and Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Miss Mitford's 

 Our Village. 



Anyone writing in the last century on scented plants 

 would certainly have written of musk. Now for many 

 years past it has been impossible for anyone to find a 

 plant with anything more than the faintest suspicion of 

 scent. So far no explanation of this unsatisfactory 

 phenomenon, indeed, no guess even at what may be the 

 explanation has been offered, so far as I know, by any 

 botanist. An old Etonian told me that in his day musk was 

 a favourite carpeting plant for the window-boxes of Eton 

 10 



