16 BOOK OF THE SCENTED GARDEN 
matter; and these are things no chemist as yet can do. 
When we ask ourselves what the green leaf does for 
us, the answer would seem miraculous had we not got 
used to accepting its products as a mere matter of course 
—timber for the builder’s yard, corn for the granary, 
flowers and sweet leafage for the bride’s chamber, moss 
for the grave. The green leaves feed the cattle, the 
flocks and herds on a thousand hills. They give corn 
and wine and oil to the teeming millions of our little 
sphere. Every green leaf is a chemical laboratory, 
acting like a dynamo under the power of sunshine and 
fresh air; a still-room in miniature distilling for our 
needs the most potent of health-and-strength-yielding 
products. 
It seems a hard saying, perhaps, but it is quite true, 
that the aroma and flavour of our food, our wine, the 
very ‘‘milk and honey” of our lives, is primarily depen- 
dent on ‘‘nothing but leaves.” Perfumes of flowers 
and leaves enter into all our relations with life and love 
and death. Nero burnt more than a whole year’s 
produce of spices and perfumes from Arabia on the pyre 
of his favourite wife and empress Poppza. 
Sweet leaves are like our five senses, potential for 
good, and like them rich in promise, for to green leaves 
alone is due every good gift that we value and enjoy 
from the vegetable world. 
The moral is, let us, then, grow in our greenhouses 
and gardens all the fragrant herbs we can. Here is a 
taste—a fashion if you will—that has come down to us 
from the foundations of human history; not a fashion 
like that of bicycles or bonnets, but a precious possession 
for all time. From the day when the great Creator 
gave food for the cattle and ‘‘herb for the service of 
man” the perfume-distilling leaves have been with us as 
they will be with us in joy and in sorrow, in life, in 
love, and in death, to the end of time. 
