SOME BOOKS FOR AN AMATEUR GARDENER'S LIBRARY. 409 



The same year saw the pubUcation of Forbes Watson's " Flowers 

 and Gardens," a small but epoch-making collection of short essays. 

 The first twelve deal with the details of the beauty, and the meaning 

 of that beauty, of such well-known flowers as Crocuses, Snowdrops, 

 Primroses, Cowslips, and Daifodils, though occasionally his ideas appear 

 rather fanciful and unconvmcing, as in his explanation of the charm 

 of Daffodil leaves consisting in its " suggestion of water, the source 

 and type of coolness and freshness," and that the superficial appearance 

 of the Cowslip is strongly suggestive of sheep. Yet there are so many 

 sentences that show us in a flash beauties hitherto unnoticed that 

 all should possess and read again and again this charming book. 

 Thus, writing of the white, waxy, hardened tip of Snowdrop and Daffodil 

 leaves, he points out first how it fits them for piercing the ground, 

 and then writes : " And how wonderfully it adds to the beauty of 

 these plants ! Every artist knows what a striking effect can be given 

 by a few well-placed dots to a broken line. And just so it is here. 

 Their sparkhng, dotty appearance makes the Snowdrop clusters 

 look interesting and animated from the first moment that their tips 

 pierce the ground, and in every later stage the leaves of both Snowdrop 

 and Daffodil would seem tame and meaningless without it. . . . 

 It emphasizes just that point which should catch the eye at once, 

 guiding it straight to the outHnes or leading lines, and rescuing the 

 whole plant from what might otherwise appear but a confused patch 

 of green." 



Henry Bright has written of Dr. Watson : " No modern author, 

 not even excepting Ruskin, has studied the form and the beauty of 

 flowers so closely and lovingly." 



As an instance of this I may quote the following : — 



" One of the most beautiful points in the Primrose is the manner 

 in which the paleness of the flowers is taken up by the herbage. Thus 

 look at that down upon the flower-stalks, which clothes them like 

 a soft thin halo, and seems, when you nearly examine it, to resemble 

 the white silky fibres of that lovely mildew which so often forms on 

 things decaying in close places, a something so delicate and half- 

 transparent you think it might melt at a touch." 



The second half of the book contains two chapters, one on Faults 

 in Gardening, the other on Gardeners' Flowers, and Canon Ellacombe 

 has declared in his preface to the second edition that this portion 

 of the book " was the most powerful ally that natural gardening 

 had at that time, and the one that gave the most important help in 

 the destruction of the tyranny of bedding-out gardening. If it did 

 not give the actual death-blow, it certainly gave the first of the death- 

 blows and the one that had most effect." 



This Dr. Watson did by showing how the beauty of individual 

 flowers was lost by making it only part of a mass of colour. He 

 wrote : " Our flower-beds are mere masses of colour instead of an 

 assemblage of living beings : the plant is never old, never young ; it 

 degenerates from a plant into a coloured ornament." 



VOL. XL. 2 F 



