JOHN RUSKIN 289 



where the Nasturtiums twine lovingly all the summer amongst the 

 Jasmine, Clematis, and thickly-trellised Rose where the towering 

 splendour of the Hollyhocks is confronted by the broad discs of 

 the Sunflower, and where the huge leaves, herbs, and fruit-trees 

 of the kitchen-garden run close up on, or intermix with, the 

 border flowers, amongst which we may meet at any time with 

 some new or long-absent friend ? Here are no masses of colour 

 in the modern sense ; but do you ever feel the want of them ? 

 Or can you turn from these simple plots, unstudied for effect, to 

 the showy, unvaried brilliancy of the modern border, and find 

 that you miss nothing there? Do not the plants seem com- 

 paratively wanting in interest? Do they not seem to be in- 

 dividually less dear, to hold you with a lighter grasp ? Now what 

 can be the reason of this? The old gardeners, we are told, 

 thought little of beauty, and chiefly of genera and species. Why, 

 then, should the poet find that, with all its faults, the old garden 

 stirs him in those depths which the modern one can seldom 

 reach? This defect is far less conspicuous in the larger hot- 

 houses and greenhouses, and I am convinced that it depends 

 almost wholly on false principles of arrangement. I will give an 

 illustration of this. Everybody knows the little blue annual 

 Lobelia. It is a pretty flower, but, as the gardeners place it in 

 their show-beds, it seems as cold and unlovable as if it was 

 wrought of steel. Yet, should we ever think it so if we found it 

 rising stem by stem amongst the looser grass, in such meadows 

 as the Harebell, Milkwort, or Eyebright (Euphrasia) will often 

 enter, or perhaps in closer tufts on open banks of gravel ? I have 

 chosen localities altogether imaginary, and am, of course, well 

 aware that the plant's colours are too bright to associate easily 

 with the tints of our native flowers. Flowers and Gardens. 



Y^OU have heard it said (and I believe there is more than JOHN 



fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful one) RUSKIN 

 that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of some one who 



