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PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
houses, and no city had greater facility for encouraging a love 
of flowers. The Flemings had introduced plants previously 
unknown, or little-known, in England, such as the gillyflower, 
carnation, Provence rose, and an improved culture of various 
bulbs ; also, useful vegetables such as carrot, celery, and 
cabbage. Sir J. E. Smith has left an account of the Norwich 
gardens as he remembered them about 1770 : — “The taste for 
horticulture sometimes extended itself, from the flowery 
parterre, and the well-arranged rows of tulips, hyacinths, 
carnations and auriculas, into no less formal labyrinths, or 
perhaps a double pattern of angular or spiral walks, between 
clipped hedges, exactly alike on each side of a broad gravel 
walk. Such was the most sublime effort of the art within the 
compass of our recollection. ‘ Grove ’ could by no means be 
said to ‘ nod at grove,’ for the perpendicular and well-trimmed 
structure was incapable of nodding ; but that ‘ each alley 
should have a brother ’ was an indispensable part of the design. 
Greenhouses of exotic plants, except oranges and myrtles, were 
at this time scarcely known, and the writer well recollects 
having seen, with wonder and admiration, one of the first 
African geraniums that ever bloomed in Norwich.” 6 
Any man might possess pots of plants or perhaps a small 
strip of land, though the gardens of the rich were open only 
to a few. Taverns were known by such names as “ Fair 
Flora” and “Flower in Hand.” 3 At the Maid’s Head or 
at The Dove in Dove Lane, the “ Sons of Flora ” assembled 
to study Horticulture, and in the “ Norwich Gazette ” for 1729 
“ Shows of well-blown flowers by the Sons of Flora ” were 
advertised. 10 But some of the humblest of the Norwich 
journeymen weavers, tailors, and dyers became botanists 
rather than floriculturists, for their trade-journeys among their 
fellow-workers took them beyond the confines of the city ; in 
the prosperous days of the woollen manufacture the country 
for twenty miles round Norwich was full of looms. 
The city of Norwich within the walls being little more than 
a mile in diameter, it was impossible for the inhabitants to be 
deprived of the wild flowers which grew in abundance just 
