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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
must not blame the Orchids too much, since botanists and 
geologists agree in telling us that they are the most modern of 
all flowers—Nature’s last bit of floral patchwork or mosaic- 
formed of the shreds and patches of older things. 
The Green Leaf as a Chemical Laboratory. 
Let us now ask ourselves what the odour-distilling green 
leaf as a chemist does for us. Well, it works whilst we are 
resting, as well as when we are awake. “ Be aye stickin’ in a 
tree Jock : it’ll grow while ye’re sleepin’,” is a well-worn Scotch 
proverb. But the green leaf does more than the chemist can do 
in his finest of laboratories. It can turn sugar into starch (as 
well as starch into sugar); it can bring forth life out of dead 
matter; and these are things no chemist as yet can do. When 
we ask ourselves what the green leaf does for us, the answer 
would seem miraculous had we not got used to accepting its 
products as a mere matter of course—timber for the builder’s 
yard, corn for the granary, flowers and sweet leafage for the 
bride’s chamber, moss for the grave. The green leaves feed the 
cattle, the flocks and herds on a thousand hills. They give corn 
and wine and oil to the teeming millions of our little sphere. 
Every green leaf is a chemical laboratory, acting like a dynamo 
under the power of sunshine and fresh air; a still-room in 
miniature distilling for our needs the most potent of health-and- 
strength-yielding products. 
It seems a hard saying, perhaps, but it is quite true, that the 
aroma and flavour of our food, our wine, the very “ milk and 
honey” of our lives, is primarily dependent on “ nothing but 
leaves.” Perfumes of flowers and leaves enter into all our rela¬ 
tions with life and love and death. Nero burnt more than a 
whole year’s produce of spices and perfumes from Arabia on the 
pyre of his favourite wife and empress Popp sea. 
Sweet leaves are like our five senses, potential for good, and 
like them rich in promise, for to green leaves alone is due every 
good gift that we value and enjoy from the vegetable world. 
The moral is, let us, then, grow in our greenhouses and 
gardens all the fragrant herbs we can. Here is a taste—a 
fashion if you will—that has come down to us from the founda¬ 
tions of human history; not a fashion like that of bicycles 
or bonnets, but a precious possession for all time. From 
