THE GREEN LEAF 15 
the most exquisite of tropical Orchids and other exotics 
in damp, warm greenhouses. You will be satiated with 
exquisite flower, form and colour, and perfume. For, 
after all (and I hope the Orchid growers will forgive 
me, for I am an old Orchid collector and grower and 
lover myself), Orchids are, in a sense, what dear old 
Parkinson called ‘‘ outlandish flowers ”—flowers having, 
like Albert Smith’s coryphées, ‘‘ exquisite bodies but no 
souls.” No sentiment lingers around them, no sweet 
old-fashioned legend or tradition; their perfume even is 
borrowed, as it were, and not their very own; and we 
may be said to admire them rather than to love them, 
and when satiated with their beauty we turn to the dear 
old Cloves, Carnations, Pinks, Roses, Violets, Musk, 
and scented-leaved Geraniums (Pelargoniums) of our 
grandmothers’ gardens—things primeval, as it were, 
that peer and peasant, rich and poor alike, can grow and 
admire. Artemus Ward used to say that modern English 
authors would have had a good opening if the early 
poets and Shakespeare had not said all the good things 
before their time; so that we must not blame the Orchids 
too much, since botanists and geologists agree in telling 
us that they are the most modern of all flowers—Nature’s 
last bit of floral patchwork or mosaic—formed of the 
shreds and patches of older things. 
THe GREEN LEAF AS A CHEMICAL LABORATORY 
Let us now ask ourselves what the odour-distilling 
green leaf as a chemist does for us. Well, it works 
whilst we are resting, as well as when we are awake. 
‘“< Be aye stickin’ in a tree, Jock: it'll grow while ye’re 
sleepin’,” is a well-worn Scotch proverb. But the green 
leaf does more than the chemist can do in his finest of 
laboratories. It can turn sugar into starch (as well as 
starch into sugar); it can bring forth life out of dead 
