•^ Introduction (g* 



boys, and used to fill their rooms with fragrance. How 

 vividly, too, one remembers the musk plants lovingly 

 tended on cottage window-sills. Their owners trained 

 them up tiny thin ladders, narrow at the bottom, to fit 

 the pot, and wide at the top, and when the ladder was 

 completely covered no one could desire a prettier or more 

 fragrant pot-plant. Small wonder that they were such a 

 source of pride and pleasure to their owners. And how 

 1 at home ' those little pots looked on sunny window-sills. 

 Musk is not the only flower which has lost its scent. 

 Clusius, 1 writing in the sixteenth century, describes the 

 largest of the snowdrops (Galanthus plicatus) as being 

 scented, but it is apparently scentless now. This snowdrop 

 is a native of the Crimea, and was the flower which gave 

 our soldiers in the Crimean War so much pleasure when 

 they first saw it in bloom, for it reminded them of our 

 own native snowdrops. 



It is curious how the same flower scent affects people 

 differently according to circumstances. The scent of 

 gorse flowers, especially of the double flowered gorse, 

 would not, I think, give us much pleasure in summer, yet 

 in spring it seems to hold captive as by a miracle the 

 glory of a whole day of sun and warmth. The rather 

 crude scent of cow-parsley in mass is not a favourite 

 scent with country-folk. But to town- folk it is delightful, 

 simply because it is one of the most familiar scents of an 

 English lane in May. To anyone returning from a 

 tropical country it is probably far more welcome than 

 any rich Eastern scent, and for no other reason than that 

 it is one of the homely country smells with which he has 



1 Rariorum aliquot Stirpium per Pannionam et Austriam. Ex officina 

 Ckristophori Plantini. 1583. 



II 



