Flowers and Gardens 



of beauty, or it becomes most wholly 

 worthless, and real gain in beauty must 

 atone for any such loss. But why is the 

 gardener in such risk of learning to dis- 

 like the special characters of the unculti- 

 vated flower ? Simply because his labour 

 is for the most part directed to efface 

 them, to supplant that style of beauty 

 by the opposite. Yet it is not always 

 so, as we see from the hothouse Orchids. 



Note 2 



The gardener, then, is an artist who 

 interprets Nature by showing her full 

 capabilities, by carrying out any beautiful 

 tendency whatsoever of a plant to its 

 fullest consummation. It is a work not 

 only of evolution, but of change. He 

 sometimes appears principally to be en- 

 larging the native form, and displaying 

 it to better advantage ; but he frequently 

 must alter it altogether, as in the double 

 flowers, and replace it by something new. 

 His creations are, therefore, often neces- 

 sarily very one-sided, and apt to be much 

 influenced by caprices of novelty and 

 fancy, so that it is well to counterbalance 

 their effect upon the mind by an habitual 

 study of wild plants. But it is only when 



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