COLOUR IN MY GARDEN 



crushed strawberry and chocolate, rose-mauve and tawny 

 yellow, orange-scarlet and bronze, gray-brown and violet, 

 plum and gray, and many more. 



No early garden literature is so interesting and amusing 

 as that concerned with Tulips. They were the florists' 

 flower par excellence of the seventeenth and early eigh- 

 teenth centuries. The old writers, in a fever to do justice 

 to this flower of their hearts — and pocketbooks — reck- 

 lessly mixed fancy with fact in their disquisitions upon 

 the Tulip and its culture. I have a little old brown volume 

 published in 1711 called the "Dutch Gardener or the Curious 

 Florist" written by Henry Van Osten, "the Leyden Gar- 

 dener," wherein are pages and pages of almost impassioned 

 writing about Tulips and of curious theories concerning the 

 influence of the moon and the wind upon their welfare. In 

 Van Osten's day the Gillyflower was the Tulip's rival. 

 Early works devote equal space and equally elegant language 

 to the two, but the Leyden gardener leaves no doubt in 

 the minds of his readers as to his personal preference. In 

 those days as now the charge of scentlessness was made 

 against Tulips and the eloquent Dutchman was moved to 

 the following defence: 



"Those that value the July Flowers [Jilly Flowers] above 

 the Tulips because of their pleasant smell, their lasting 

 longer, and their bearing of more Flowers, would do well to 

 consider that flowers ought chiefly to please the Sight, and 

 that the Smell gives them no Beauty and indeed affords 

 but little pleasure before the Flower is pulled and removed 

 from its place. Those, therefore, that delight in Flowers, are 

 willing to be without the Smell, if their Eye be but satisfied : 



69 



