134 
Old Time Gardens 
For several years the first blossom of the new 
year in our garden was neither the Snowdrop nor 
Crocus, but the Ladies’ Delight, that laughing, 
speaking little garden face, which is not really a 
spring flower, it is a stray from summer; but it is 
such a shrewd, intelligent little creature that it readily 
found out that spring was here ere man or other 
flowers knew it. This dear little primitive of the 
Pansy tribe has become wonderfully scarce save in 
cherished old gardens like those of Salem, where I 
saw this year a space thirty feet long and several feet 
wide, under flowering shrubs and bushes, wholly 
covered with the everyday, homely little blooms of 
Ladies’ Delights. They have the party-colored 
petal of the existing strain of English Pansies, dis- 
tinct from the French and German Pansies, and I 
doubt not are the descendants of the cherished 
garden children of the English settlers. Gerarde 
describes this little English Pansy or Heartsease in 
1587 under the name of Viola tricolor : — 
“ The flouers in form and figure like the Violet, and for 
the most part of the same Bignesse, of three sundry colours, 
purple, yellow and white or blew, by reason of the beauty 
and braverie of which colours they are very pleasing to the 
eye, for smel they have little or none.” 
In Breck’s Book of Flowers, 1851, is the first 
printed reference I find to the flower under the 
name Ladies’ Delight. In my childhood I never 
heard it called aught else ; but it has a score of folk 
names, all testifying to an affectionate intimacy : 
Bird’s-eye; Garden-gate ; Johnny-jump-up ; None- 
