OLD-TIME FLOWERS 
201 
deviating precision—a most self-conscious flower, al¬ 
ways on its good behavior. The dissolute members 
of the family—careless “parrot” strains—only came 
into polite society when such society became less pains¬ 
taking about its politeness, along with the breaking 
up of garden and other affected little conventionalities, 
towards the end of the seventeenth century. 
By this time the discoveries in the West Indies, 
South America and our own continent had brought 
many new plants to the gardens and gardeners of 
Europe; and these novelties gradually usurped the 
place of the haughty belle from the Orient. Indeed, 
not only was she dethroned, but the time came when 
this flower of flowers—which had driven the staid 
Hollanders to such a degree of madness that their 
government interfered to stop the ruinous speculation 
in tulip bulbs in which they were indulging—was con¬ 
sidered, for a while at least, only a very common, lowly, 
poor man’s flower. 
It is not with the amazingly popular flowers of old 
time that we are concerned, however—at least not with 
these to the exclusion of others, although in any repro¬ 
duction of an old type of garden these should of course 
receive the prominence which that particular type ac¬ 
corded them—but with the generally planted flowers, 
the flowers which grew in everyone’s garden during 
the one hundred and seventy-five years which we have 
