THE CHARM OP GARDENS 



mandarin nodding at him from the Chrysanthemums ; 

 and there's a ghost in his cabbage patch of Sir Anthony 

 Ashley of Wimbourne St. Giles in Dorsetshire. 



Ploughman Giles is a fortunate man, and we, too, 

 bless his enterprise and his love of striking colours and 

 good perfumes when we lean over the gate of his cottage 

 garden to give him good-day. 



I showed him once a photograph of a picture by 

 Holbein — the Merchant of the Steel Yard — and pointed 

 out the vase of flowers on the table and the very same 

 flowers growing side by side in his garden, Carnations, 

 the old single kind, and single Gilly-flower. He looked 

 at the picture with his glasses cocked at the proper 

 angle on his nose — he's an oldish man and short-sighted 

 — and -said in his husky voice, " Well, zur, I be sur- 

 prised to zee un." And he called out his wife to look — 

 which didn't please her much as she was cooking — but, 

 when she saw the flowers, " In that there queer gentle- 

 man's room, and as true as life, so they do be," she be- 

 came enthusiastic, wiped her hands many times on her 

 apron, and looked from the picture to the actual flowers 

 growing in her garden with a kind of awe and wonder. 

 It was of far more interest to them to know that they 

 were hand in glove with the history of their own country 

 than it would have been to learn that chemists made a 

 wonderful drug called digitalis out of the Foxgloves 

 by the fence. I gave them the photograph and it 

 hangs in a proud position next to a stuffed and bloated 

 perch in a glass-case ; and, what is more, they have an 

 added sense of dignity from the dim, far away time the 

 picture represents to them. 



" He might a plucked they flowers in this very garden," 

 she says ; and indeed, he might if he had happened that 

 way. But the older flowers, though they don't realise 

 it, are the people themselves. Ploughman Giles and his 



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