WALAFRED STRABO : A GARDENER OF THE "DARK" AGES. 137 
fruit as if turned in a lathe — " slim is the stem from which it hangs, 
but huge the bulk to which it bulges. Let it harden and you can 
make utensils of the rind, it will serve as a bushel, or pitched inside 
will be a jar for liquor." (2) He would describe the colour of the 
gladiola, the glory of purple springtime, as like the hyacinth or the 
darker violets ; while there is a real touch of genuine feeling when he 
speaks of white lilies too lovely for the narrow range of his starved 
and meagre muse.* (3) And lastly he comes to roses, and there, like 
all true gardeners, cannot control himself. " Better and sweeter are 
they than all the other plants and rightly called the flower of flowers. 
Yes, roses and lilies, the one for virginity with no sordid toil " — (they 
spin not ?) — -"no warmth of love, but the glow of their own sweet 
scent, which spreads further than the rival roses, but once bruised 
or crushed turns all to rankness. Therefore roses and lilies for our 
church, one for the martyr's blood, the other for the symbol in his 
hand. Pluck them, 0 maiden, roses for war and lilies for peace, 
and think of that Flower of the stem of Jesse. Lilies His words were, 
and the hallowed acts of His pleasant life, but His death re-dyed the 
roses." 
I like this little outburst, which to me rings true of the gentle old 
churchman's soul, and all the more because here and there the pedantic 
schoolmaster peeps out, though the derivations of names are less dwelt 
on than in the more typical herbals. In fact, I see none save the 
obvious gladiola, the homonym for sage — " Letifagus (fugus ?) Salvia 
quam Graio dicunt Elelispathon ore " — and the queer suggestion that 
the poppy gets its name from the sound of the seeds being eaten. 
This is puzzling, as the tough capsule does not pop, and the Greek 
word (ixrjKdiv) is quite different, but it is possible that if eaten in quan- 
tities there may be something onomatopoeic in it as in the English 
word pap. 
Such, then, was the monk's garden plot at Weissenburg, such his 
zeal and taste, and so did he employ his leisure hours eleven centuries 
ago. Perhaps others besides myself remember near Florence the 
Certosa in Val d'Ema before its suppression : it is one of the most 
delightful of my Florentine memories, one of those glimpses which 
often suddenly come up in the mind's eye unbidden and at the oddest 
times— the courtyard and cloister, the kind old white-frocked monks, 
the flower-pots round the fonte, and the splashed water drying in the 
brooding sunshine. Even now it helps me better to picture the 
concluding words of Walafred's idyll. There is a similar cloister 
court, only round-arched, not pointed, and it leads to an orchard. 
Part of it is divided into beds and planted, each bed raised, as we saw, 
by a stockade of logs, and though part lies bare and untidy in the shade, 
part glows with roses and pinks and lilies among the tender greys and 
greens of vegetables and aromatic herbs. On one side, he says, a 
row of alders makes a background matted to the very top by the 
broad leaves and swelling fruit of climbing gourds. Beyond them, 
* " jejunae macies . . . arida nostrae Musae." 
VOL. XLVII. L 
