APPRECIATION 



^vhereit should notgroiv, he thinks only of his canary; 

 and as for orchids, when he asks his soul and his con- 

 science, he infinitely prefers a sweet pea. This, then, 

 if lam right, is one of the cases so finely summed up 

 by the poet when he says : 



" Where ignorance is bliss, 



'Tis folly to be wise" 



A nd, indeed, one does not covet the wisdom of the expert 

 when he reels out those long Latinnames, in false and 

 barbarous Latin, of the various plants that you ad- 

 mire names which he sometimes remembers, but, if 

 I am not wrong, more often invents and which the 

 ignoramus, like myself, only listens to with pitying 

 wonder that a science so beautiful as horticulture 

 should be bound up with such technical terms. There 

 is another way in which we ignorant people can en- 

 joy gardens. There is the literature of horticulture. 

 Publishers, I believe, will tell you that there is nothing 

 that pays so well as a book on gardens. But the books 

 that I love best on gardens were published at a time 

 vvhen one may safely say that publishers did not 

 care whether they brought in a profit or not. There 

 is, for example, Lord Bacons essays, containing one 

 exquisite essay on gardening which sums up in a 

 sentence the best that can be said of gardening : 



vi 



