46 GARDENS PAST AND PRESENT 



of the great national art of gardening. Time was, 

 in the days of decadence, when a botanic garden 

 was a name of horror to a garden lover, a spot 

 where dry scientific arrangement precluded all idea 

 of beauty, where stiff beds of plants weeds, as 

 they were styled by the ignorant and irreverent 

 gave, as it was expressed, no living interest to 

 any but a botanist as dry-as-dust as his own hortus- 

 siccus. With the examples before our eyes of 

 Kew, Edinburgh, Dublin, and the no less attractive 

 and well-cared-for establishments of the universi- 

 ties and others, we have learned to know not only 

 the world-wide importance of a modern botanic 

 garden, but its practical help to every member of 

 the community who chooses to ask for it. 



Do we ask the purpose of the great mother 

 establishment of Kew as it exists in this twentieth 

 century ? In olden times, as we have seen, it was 

 mainly medical science that laid the foundation 

 of the physic or botanic garden. Nowadays it is 

 clear that not medicine only, but all vegetable pro- 

 ducts which affect the economic welfare of the 

 British people at home or in our colonies, in agri- 

 culture or manufacture, in commerce or in horti- 

 culture, all come under its jurisdiction. All vege- 

 table products ! Can an outside observer measure, 

 even to the extent of a limited range, how they 

 affect our common every-day life ? timber, cereals, 

 roots and fruits, the indispensable beverages of 

 the breakfast table, wines, spices, vegetable oils, 

 dyes and scents, cotton, flax, hemp, with the in- 

 numerable plants of textile value of new discovery 

 the thousands of economic plants, in short, 



