PREFACE 
“‘ The outside of the vase is scrawled over with odd shapes, and writing, but 
within are precious liquors, healing medicines, and far-gathered herbs and 
flowers.” —FPlato. 
Tus little book about the Scented Garden and its 
contents, or potentialities, has grown up out of the 
original notes and quotations prepared for a paper on 
‘‘Fragrant Leaves v. Sweet-Scented Flowers,” read 
before the Council and Fellows of the Royal Horti- 
cultural Society, in April 1898, at the Drill Hall, 
Westminster. “The paper itself was published in the 
Journal of the Society, vol. xxii. part ii. pp. 134-75. 
In thanking the Council and Secretary for their kind 
permission to make that paper the backbone, as it were, 
of this book, I should like to say that I owe a good deal 
of my professional education to the Royal Horticultural 
Society and its garden at Chiswick, having been a 
student there before I was so fortunate as to be employed 
mainly as a gardener, but occasionally as a botanical 
draughtsman and copyist, at Kew. ‘To these two institu- 
tions, it may be said, we really owe the pre-eminence 
in botany and in horticulture that we enjoy as a nation 
to-day. While Kew has up to a recent date mainly 
helped the Colonies and India, both by the introduction 
of suitable economic plants, and the training of young 
gardeners and others to cultivate them, we may fairly claim 
that the Royal Horticultural Society, unaided by either 
funds or patronage from the government, has ever done 
its best for our home fields and gardens. It is indeed a 
moot question whether, ‘‘Imperial Kew by Thames’ 
glittering side,” as kept up by State expenditure, or the 
vil 
