MAY 111 



first time, on a lovely spring morning, in the celebrated 

 Italian garden of Diane de Poitiers at Chenonceaux. 

 Never was there a more dreary rectangle ! So far from 

 being a place of flowers, it seemed to be a space from 

 which every blossoming thing had been laboriously 

 expunged. True, that in a couple of months there 

 would be a fine blaze of red, blue, and yellow ; but what 

 memories could that fleeting display waken of the 

 sweet, naughty ladies who paced here in the days of 

 Brantome and Ronsard? Whereas one great charm 

 of the old class of ' herbaceous stuff/ as gardeners con- 

 temptuously called it but a few summers ago, lies in 

 their permanence. Many are not only technically 

 perennial, in the sense of not having to be resown 

 annually, but seem even to have the property of per- 

 petual youth. In many an old English garden there 

 are vigorous clumps of scarlet lychnis or fragrant 

 dittany coeval with mighty oaks in the park outside ; 

 and a girl may gather a posy to-day from the self-same 

 tuft on which another of her kin dropped tears as she 

 thought of lover or husband riding with Falkland at 

 Newbury or Rupert at Marston Moor. 



But another secret of our affection for old-fashioned 

 flowers is contained in their old-fashioned names, of 

 which some are no more than homely, but others are 

 full of tender or plaintive meaning. Some flowers have 

 titles of both qualities ; that, for instance, now known 

 to everybody as forget-me-not, though Gerarde and the 

 old herbalists called it scorpion-grass, because in its 

 spike of unopened buds could be traced a resemblance 



