GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



vegetables of all kinds from the humble potato to the stately, 

 graceful asparagus. But its chief attractiveness lies in the her- 

 baceous borders, which, in full summer-time, are filled with old- 

 fashioned and sweet-smelling flowers. Of some of these I do not 

 know so much as the common English name, although they may 

 be found in every cottage garden but among the rest are many 

 that, there is every reason to think, have not changed since garden- 

 ing began : they were to our ancestors what they are to us. And 

 is there not something curiously stimulating and delightful in the 

 fancy which is not indeed fancy, but fact that Chaucer, Shake- 

 speare and Bacon, and all the flower-lovers since their days- 

 plucked and smelt these very flowers, or their exact counterparts V 

 The cowslip was yellow, the wild rose was flushed with pink, in 

 mediaeval times as now : and when Spenser wrote of the " rose 

 engrained in pure scarlet dye," and of the " primrose greene," depend 

 upon it he meant to describe that on which he looked namely, a 

 red rose, and a yellow primrose : because words, in the course of 

 a century or two, may alter in both sound and sense ; but not so 

 the natural objects that they essay to paint for us. Nor do the 

 perfumes of Nature change. The violet and the lavender, the wild 

 thyme and the southernwood, are neither more nor less sweet at 

 the present day, than they were four hundred years ago. " On 

 May day," in Stowe's quaint language, " every man except impedi- 

 ment would walke into the sweete woods, there to rejoice their 

 spirits with the beauty and flavour of sweet Flowers," and these 

 were the field flowers that are with us still. When Herrick's 

 Corinna, that " sweet slug-a-bed," went " a-maying " with her 

 friends, they sniffed the same delicious flower-incense that we 

 inhale whenever the " thorn is white with blossom." The thought 

 seems to me to bridge the centuries, and to bring us nearer to Bacon 

 and Shakespeare and to their contemporaries for here, in this 

 old English garden, are no double or treble flowers unknown to 

 Bacon. Green carnations and blue roses, " they are but toyes," 

 he would have said. Look for them in the more modern borders 

 nearer the house : if they exist at all depend upon it they are 

 there. But here the flowers are Perdita's own; and, like happy 

 but unruly children, they are not to be strictly kept in bounds in 

 summer. They escape and wander sometimes into the neigh- 

 bouring territory of the strawberry, the gooseberry, and the lettuce. 



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