346 
FLORA AND SYLVA 
it abounds their honey gains in excellence. 
To this is ascribed the virtue of the honey of 
Mt. Himette and Mt. Ida in classic times, 
and that of Narbonne and Mahon at the 
present day. VIVIAND MOREL. 
Lyon. 
HENRY G. MOON. 
With infinite regret we have to give 
some record of the Hfe of the artist 
of Flora and Sylva, who died at St. 
Albans on 6th October. Best of flower 
painters and a landscape painter of fine 
accomplishment and finer promise, his 
loss is keenly felt by all who knew him. 
For many years he made the drawings 
for the coloured plates of the Garden^ 
and also the plates for that noble book 
on Orchids issued by Mr. Sander. For 
a long period all the finest new plants 
were drawn by him with perfect truth 
to nature, in form as in colour. 
Born loth February 1857, he went 
to school at Dr. Bell's at Barnett, until 
the death of his father ; he was also a 
student at the Birkbeckand St. Martin's 
School of Art, where he gained many 
prizes . He was the son of aparliamentary 
agent, who, dying early in life, left a 
young and numerous family unprovided 
for, and Henry, brought up in comfort, 
in a garden where Alexandra Palace now 
stands , had soon to go to work as a boy in 
a solicitor's oflice and in the most in- 
artistic surroundings. An artist to the 
finger-tips however, he began to sketch 
on Hampstead Heath in the summer 
mornings and evenings, and there were 
someearlystudies in theLondon schools. 
About that time I put an advertisement 
seeking one to draw flowers after nature, 
and a tall, rather dark youth came to 
see me, looking more like a Celt than 
a Londoner. I gave him a spray of 
white Azalea to draw upon wood , which 
he brought back very gracefully done. 
This led to his giving up the solicitor's 
oflice and comingtothe Garden ^vA{\q\\ 
brought him nearer to beautiful things 
in the plant way, and also to gardens 
and country seats. 
Before the days of the Garden plates 
it was a common practice to exaggerate 
the drawing of flowers. There was a 
false florists' ideal set up to which all 
had to conform : a circle and a large 
Cauliflower being the accepted models. 
This way was bad for all, and for none 
more so than the unfortunate artists 
who had not to think of what they saw, 
so much as of the corrupt ideal they were 
told to strive for. So we began with 
the determination to draw things as 
they drew themselves, and never devi- 
ated from it — no matter who was dis- 
pleased. If the flowers of a plant were 
small, from the weakness of newly- 
introduced or feeble plants, all the better 
if they were in time found to be more 
beautiful and larger than shown in the 
plate. And the public rarely saw the 
beauty of the drawings, owing to the 
drawbacks of even the best colour- 
printing, in which all the more delicate 
work of the artist is often injured. 
In his work he took great pains to put 
the shoot in its natural attitude — study- 
ing that at first and then fixing his flow- 
ers securely , exactly in the way they were 
to be drawn. This, which seems the 
common- sense way, is not at all fol- 
lowed by students, who often begin 
anyway, and then try to arrange as they 
go- 
