io8 Sportsmen Parsons in Peace and War 



exception of Sir Joseph Paxton, whose name is now immortahsed 

 by a particularly luscious strawberry named after him. Such is 

 fame ! and how few of us will be immortalised even by a straw- 

 berry. 



As a gardener, Dean Hole knew as much about plants and 

 flowers as any man of his time. He had a beautiful fancy that 

 perhaps it is some dim remembrance of Paradise lost that makes 

 little children love flowers. 



At one time he owned four thousand rose-trees, and was so 

 great an authority on the subject that rose-growers from all 

 over the country sent him specimens for his criticism or advice, 

 which he was always glad to give, although he used to get rather 

 annoyed with people v/ho would send roses packed in frail 

 cardboard boxes on which the postman invariably seemed to 

 have trodden. He organised the first National Rose Show, and 

 was always in demand as a judge at flower-exhibitions all over 

 England. In time he became an expert in detecting the cloven 

 hoof, which makes its appearance even at such apparently 

 innocent things as flower-shows. 



I always pictured the exhibitors at flower-shows as sylph- 

 like beings with guileless faces and utterly ignorant of all 

 mundane vices. I liked to think of them dancing through the 

 dew, bearing posies to the flower-show, and singing as they 

 came ; but apparently I was all wrong. One sylph, for in- 

 stance, exhibited twelve varieties of a plant, having secretly 

 hired half of them for the occasion from a florist. Hole got 

 wind of this and drove off post-haste to the exhibitor's garden 

 to verify the facts, and was in time to prevent the first prize 

 being awarded to the fraudulent twelve, so that when the 

 expectant sylph arrived he found, not the prize card, but one 

 bearing the words : " Disqualified and Expelled from the 

 Society." 



Gardening was not nearly so universally popular in Hole's 

 early days as it is now, and the fashion was for stiff, formal 

 gardens ; but he liked broad effects best with plenty of grass and 

 trees and no straight lines. When in town, he often escaped 

 from the noise of the streets by flying to Veitch's nurser}^- 

 garden in the King's Road, Chelsea, where he had known the 

 proprietors for two generations and could spend congenial hours 

 in their glass-houses whenever he liked ; and he was never tired 



