152 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



must not blame the Orchids too much, since botanists and 

 geologists agree in telling us that they are the most modern of 

 all flowers — Nature's last bit of floral patchwork or mosaic — 

 formed of the shreds and patches of older things. 



The Gkeen Leaf as a Chemical Laboratory. 



Let us now ask ourselves what the odour-distilling green 

 leaf as a chemist does for us. Well, it works whilst we are 

 resting, as well as when we are awake. " Be aye stickin' in a 

 tree Jock : it'll grow while ye're sleepin'," is a well-worn Scotch 

 proverb. But the green leaf does more than the chemist can do 

 in his finest of laboratories. It can turn sugar into starch (as 

 well as starch into sugar) ; it can bring forth life out of dead 

 matter ; and these are things no chemist as yet can do. When 

 we ask ourselves what the green leaf does for us, the answer 

 would seem miraculous had we not got used to accepting its 

 products as a mere matter of Gourse — timber for the builder's 

 yard, corn for the granary, flowers and sweet leafage for the 

 bride's chamber, moss for the grave. The green leaves feed the 

 cattle, the flocks and herds on a thousand hills. They give corn 

 and wine and oil to the teeming millions of our little sphere. 

 Every green leaf is a chemical laboratory, acting like a dynamo 

 under the power of sunshine and fresh air ; a still-room in 

 miniature distilling for our needs the most potent of health-and- 

 strength-yielding products. 



It seems a hard saying, perhaps, but it is quite true, that the 

 aroma and flavour of our food, our wine, the very " milk and 

 honey" of our lives, is primarily dependent on " nothing but 

 leaves." Perfumes of flowers and leaves enter into all our rela- 

 tions with life and love and death. Nero burnt more than a 

 whole year's produce of spices and perfumes from Arabia on the 

 pyre of his favourite wife and empress Poppaea. 



Sweet leaves are like our five senses, potential for good, and 

 like them rich in promise, for to green leaves alone is due every 

 good gift that we value and enjoy from the vegetable world. 



The moral is, let us, then, grow in our greenhouses and 

 gardens all the fragrant herbs we can. Here is a taste — a 

 fashion if you will — that has come down to us from the founda- 

 tions of human history ; not a fashion like that of bicycles 

 or bonnets, but a precious possession for all time. From 



