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Old Time Gardens 
extends to a few blossoms of field and forest. It is 
felt to an inexplicable degree by all New Englanders 
for the Trailing Arbutus, our Mayflower; and it is 
this unformulated sentiment which makes us like to 
go to the same spot year after year to gather these 
beloved flowers. I am sensible of this friendship 
for Buttercups, they seem the same flowers I knew 
last year ; and I have a distinct sympathy with Owen 
Meredith’s poem : — 
“ I pluck the flowers I plucked of old 
About my feet — yet fresh and cold 
The Buttercups do bend ; 
The selfsame Buttercups they seem. 
Thick in the bright-eyed green, and such 
As when to me their blissful gleam 
Was all earth’s gold — how much ! 5 ’ 
We have little of the intense sentiment, the inspi- 
ration which filled flower-lovers of olden times. We 
admire flowers certainly as beautiful works of nature, 
as objects of wonder in mechanism and in the profu- 
sion of growth, and we are occasionally roused to 
feelings of gratitude to the Maker and Giver of 
such beauty ; but it is not precisely the same regard 
that the old gardeners and “ flowerists ” had, which 
is expressed in this quotation from Gerarde of “the 
gallant grace of violets ” : — 
“ They admonish and stir up a man to that which is 
comelie and honest ; for flowers through their beautie, 
varietie of colour and exquisite forme doe bring to a liberall 
and gentlemanly mind, the remembrance of honestie, come- 
linesse and all kinds of virtues.” 
