'53 



XXVL 

 SCARLET GERANIUMS. 



WE have such a show of many-coloured pelargoniums 

 in our little cottage-garden at this moment as would 

 put to shame, I verily believe, any modern bedded-out 

 parterre in all England. For, indeed, I will frankly 

 confess to an old-fashioned love for natural old-fashioned 

 flowers, undistorted by the florist's art ; instead of those 

 stiff, overgrown, unsymmetrical bosses of irregular leaves 

 which* nursery-gardeners nowadays display with so much 

 pride to admiring connoisseurs as splendid double 

 varieties. The doubling is, of course, produced, for the 

 most part, by converting the central stamens into shape- 

 less petals, and so destroying the native symmetry and 

 architectural ground-plan of the original flower. If you 

 look into a real natural blossom, you see in it always a 

 definite and beautiful scheme, which centres on the truly 

 essential parts the stamens and pistils : but if you look 

 into a double rose, or, still worse, a double geranium, you 

 see nothing but a confused mass of wrinkled and amor- 

 phous petals, without any distinct central point or any 

 consistent harmony of plan. It may be true, as Polixenes 

 says to Perdita, that though ' this is an art which does 

 mend nature,' yet ' nature is made better by no mean, 



