xii 



FLORA ODORATA 



little thought of, perhaps, from the blossoms that give it 

 being without showy colour, as the fragrant American wild 

 Vine. And among these modest flowers there are none more 

 delicate than the blossoms of the White Willow of Britain 

 and northern Europe, all the more grateful in air coming 

 to us. 



' O'er the northern moorland, o'er the northern foam.' 



What is the lesson these sweet flowers have for us ? They 

 tell us — if there were no other flowers to tell us — that a 

 garden should be a living thing; its life not only fair in 

 form and lovely in colour, but in its breath and essence 

 coming from the Divine. They tell us that the very com- 

 mon attempt to conform these fair lives into tile or other 

 patterns, to clip or set them out as so much mere colour 

 of the paper-stainer or carpet-maker, is to degrade them, and 

 make our gardens ugly and ridiculous, from the point of 

 view of nature or true art. And many of these treasures for 

 the open garden have been shut out of our thoughts o^ving 

 to exclusion of almost everything that did not make showy 

 colour and lend itself to carpet or other crude modes of 

 setting flowers to compete with tiles and like modes of 

 * decoration.' 



Of the many considerations that should occur in the 

 making of a beautiful garden to live in, this of fragrant 

 plants and flowers is one of the first. And happily among 

 every class of flowers which adorn our open-air gardens, 

 there are odorous things to be found. Apart from the 

 groups of plants in which all, or nearly all, are sweet, as 

 in Eoses and Violets, the annual and biennial flowers of 

 our gardens, are rich in fragrance. Stocks, Mignonette, 

 Sweet Peas, Sweet Sultan and Wallflowers, Double Eockets, 



