20 BOOK OF OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS 



after all but a piece of pretty pedantry, and necessi- 

 tated the absence of Foxgloves, Forget-me-Nots, 

 Snowdrops, and other beautiful flowers. It is indeed 

 strange that he, the greatest poet of gardens as of other 

 things, never mentions these flowers, although they must 

 have been well known to him. Speaking of the Snow- 

 drop, Gerard, who was a contemporary of Shakspere, 

 said: ''These plants doe grow wilde in Italy, and the 

 parts adjacent, notwithstanding our London gardens have 

 taken possession of most of them many years past." 

 This rather indicates that the Snowdrop then held a 

 very different place in the gardener's heart, from the 

 place which it since has won ; and doubtless the same 

 holds good of the other flowers which Shakspere left 

 unmentioned. If Shakspere were writing now, using 

 the names of flowers as he used them — '' not to show 

 his own knowledge," but because the particular flowers 

 supplied the appropriate simile or key to sentiment — he 

 could scarcely fail to mention the Foxgloves or Lady's 

 Fingers, the sweet Forget-Me-Nots, and, more beautiful 

 still, the chaste, unflinching Snowdrops. A flower takes 

 time — generations even, it may be — really to eat its way 

 into the heart of man ; for it is not enough that it be 

 merely beautiful or merely fragrant — attractive to our 

 senses though these properties are — in order that we 

 may really become incorporate with a flower. But it 

 must, in addition, be full of association, and have been 

 long watched and lovingly studied. There is one book, 

 difficult now to obtain, containing a record of the truest 

 appreciation and most careful study of flowers, and of 

 the beauty of flowers, which we have in the language. 

 That book is called Flowers and Gardens," by Dr 

 Forbes Watson, and the following passage from its 

 pages beautifully explains the sentiment of the gardener 

 who grows mainly old-fashioned flowers, or, at any rate, 

 flowers with which he has been long familiar — 



