THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



89 



.£1,000 towards the project of a Horticultural Hall and offices 

 for the Society in London. It is impossible to conclude 

 without tendering to the amateurs and to the horticultural trade 

 of the kingdom the warmest acknowledgments of the Society for 

 the hearty and unfaltering support they have ever accorded to 

 it in days of adversity, no less than in those of prosperity. 



GARDEN CRAFT. 



By the Very Rev. S. Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester. 

 [At Chester, August 4, 1896.] 



When a benevolent florist said to me that he wished every 

 man in England to have a garden of his own, and I made 

 answer, " Heaven forbid ! " I was surveyed with a pitiful disdain. 

 " Because," I continued, " three-fourths of the recipients would 

 abuse the gift. A large portion of your gardens would be 

 ultimately covered with groundsel, like his who did not think it 

 right to prejudice the soil in favour of strawberries. If you will 

 modify your benevolent suggestion, and express it thus, ' I would 

 that every man who loves a garden had a garden to love,' why 

 then with heart and voice I will sing a sevenfold Amen." 

 Alas ! for this toilsome, weary world, 



By suffering worn and weary, 

 Yet beautiful as some fair angel still, 



the love of a garden, though it is, as Lord Bacon wrote, the 

 purest of human pleasures and the greatest refreshment to the 

 spirit of man, is rare, very rare, among us. 



And yet it is innate, a sad memory of Paradise Lost, or a 

 glad prevision of Paradise Regained, in us all. There is a tradi- 

 tion in my family that in my early babyhood I seized and 

 plucked, with an admiration which was almost ferocious, an 

 artificial rose from the Sunday bonnet of my nurse. And who 

 does not remember how by the stream and in the mead, in the 

 lanes and in the w r oods, we cherished with a like fatal affection 

 in our warm little hands the violet and the primrose, the campion, 



