THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
January 5. 
i 254 
j and we make for them parks and gardens, where they 
j may walk unrestrained, and roll upon the grass even, 
and basic in the sunshine, and revel in puro air. And 
what is the consequence of all this? We must condense 
the reply into one sentence—Wo have had no Revolution. 
If we were to search through the entire “ Encyclopaedia 
of Plants ” for a single species that would illustrate best 
the working of the two systems, we should find none 
that would afford that illustration so forcibly as The 
Fuchsia. 
Who is there among the thousands who will read this 
page that would not grieve if this plant of the garden, 
the window-sill, and the conservatory, was totally de¬ 
stroyed? Who would not feel that they who nursed it 
either in a cracked tea-pot, or in an Etruscan vase, had 
to suffer a lost pleasure? Yet this gay little friend of 
the poor as well as of the rich, would never have been 
gladdening them if it could have been found nowhere 
than in Kew Gardens as managed under the old system. 
It was introduced into those gardens by a Captain birth, 
as far back as 1788, and there it remained when a 
second edition of the Hortxis Kewemis was published in 
1811. It was a close prisoner; it had not escaped to 
brighten up a cottager’s window, much less had any one 
endeavoured to raise from it varieties; like all other 
things then at Kew, it was a forcible illustration of the 
hidden talent—it was useless even to the possessor. 
Now, we know, and are rejoicing in the knowledge, 
that a hundred of its varieties are adorning our houses 
and gardens. This has all happened since 1815, and 
how it happened, how the Fuchsia got among the peo¬ 
ple, is well told in this narrative.* 
“ Soft Midsummer air, cheery with sunshine and perfumed 
with all the scents that it had robbed out of his nursery 
garden, crept in through the monthly roses at the porch and 
the halLopen cottage door, to make itself at home in George 
Swayne’s room. It busied itself there, sweeping and rustling 
about, as if it had as much right to the place and was as much 
the tenant of it as the gardener himself. It had also a sort 
of feminine and wifely claim on Georgo; who, having been 
spending half an hour over a short letter written upon a 
large sheet, was invited by the midsummer air to look after I 
his garden.—The best efforts were being made by his 
gentle friend to tear the paper from his hand. A bee had 
come into the room—George kept bees—and had been 
hovering about the letter; so drunk, possibly, with honey 
that he had mistaken it for a great lily. Certainly lie did 
at last settle upon it. The lily was a legal document to this 
effect:— 
“ i g IEi —We are hereby instructed to give you notice of the 
death of Mr. Thomas Queeks, of Edmonton, the last of the 
three lives for which your lease was granted, and to inform 
you that you may obtain a renewal of the same on the pay¬ 
ment of one hundred guineas to the undersigned. We 
: are, Sir, 
“‘Your (here the bee sat upon the obedient servants), 
“‘Flint and Griston.’ 
“ Mr. Swaync granted himself a rule to considerin his own 
mind what the lawyers meant by their uncertain phrase¬ 
ology. It did not mean,he concluded, that Messrs. F. and G. 
were willing, for one hundred pounds, to renew the life of 
Mr. Queeks, of Edmonton; but it did mean that ho must 
turn out of the house and grounds (which had been Swayne's 
Nursery Garden for three generations past) unless ho would 
pay a largo fine for the renewal of his lease. Ho was but a 
young fellow of five-and-twenty; who, until recently, had 
* This narrative is substantially true ; we believe it has been published 
in some popular work, but it was sent to us as an extract from an Irish 
'newspaper. 
been at work for the support of an old father and mother. 
His mother had been dead a twelvemonth last Midsummer- 
day ; and his father, who had been well while His dame 
was with him, sickened when she was gone, and died before 
apple-gathering was over. The cottage and the garden were 
more precious to George as a home than a place of business. 
There were thoughts of parting—like thoughts of another 
loss by death, or of all past losses again to be suffered 
freshly and together—which so clouded the eyes of Mr. 
Swayne, that at last he could scarcely tell when he looked 
at the letter whether the bee was or was not a portion of 
the writing. 
“ An old woman came in with a Midsummer cough, sound¬ 
ing as hollow as an empty coffin. She was a poor crono 
who came to do for George small services as a domestic for 
an hour or two every day ; for he lighted his own fires, and . 
served up to himself in the first style of cottage cookery his 
own fat bacon and potatoes. 
“‘I shall bo out for three hours, Milly,’ said George, and 
he put on his best clothes, and went into the sunshine. I 
1 1 can do nothing better,’ he thought, ‘ than go and see ! 
the lawyers.’ 
“ They lived in the City; George lived at the east end of 
London, in a part now covered with very dirty streets; but 
then covered with copse and field, and by Swayne’s old- 
fashioned nursery ground, then crowded with stocks and 
wallflowers, lupins, and sweet peas, pinks, lavender, hearts¬ 
ease, boy’s-love, old man, and old-fashioned plants; for it 
contained nothing so tremendous as Scliizanthuses, Escol- 
zias, or Clarkis pulchellas, which were weedy little atomies, 
though they sound enough to rival any tree on Lebanon. 
George was an old-fashioned gardener in an old-fashioned 
time; for we have here to do with events which occurred in 
the middle of the reign of Georgo the Third. George then j 
—I mean George Swayne, not Georgius Hex—marched oil’ | 
to see the lawyers, who lived in a dark court in the City, 
He found their clerk in the front office, with a marigold in 
one of his button-holes; but there was nothing else that 
looked like summer in the place. It smelt like a monthly 
shut up tool-house ; and there was parchment enough in it 
to make scarecrows for all the gardens in Kent, Middlesex, 
and Surrey. 
“ George saw the junior partner, Mr. Griston, who told 
him, when he heard his business, that it was in Mr. Flint’s 
department. When he was shown into Mr. I lint’s room, 
Mr. Flint could only repeat the instructions of the landlord. 
“ 1 You see, my lad,’ he said, ‘ these holdings that have 
been let hitherto for thirty pounds per annum are now- 
worth fifty. Yet my client, Mr. Crote, is ready to renew the 
leaso for three more lives at the very slight fine we have 
named to you. What would you have more reasonable ? ’ 
“ ‘ Sir, I make no complaint,’ George answered ; 1 only 1 
want to abide by the ground, and I have not so much 
money as you require. I owe nobody a penny; and to pay 
my way and lay by enough money for next year's seeds and 
roots, has been the most that I can manage. I have saved 
fifteen pounds. Hero it is, Sir; tako it, if it will help me 
in this business.’ : 
“‘Well,’ Mr. Flint suggested, ‘what do you say to this ? ! 
I make no promise, but 1 think I can persuade Mr. Crote to j 
let you retain possession of your land, for—shall we say ?— 
two years, at the rent of fifty pounds; and at the expiration 
of that term, you may perhaps be able to pay the fine and 
to renew your lease.’ 
“‘I will accept that offer, Sir.’ A homespun man clings 
to the walls of home. Swayne’s nursery would not support 
so high a rental; but let the future take thought for itself— I 
to postpone for two years the doom to quit the roofstree 
under which his mother suckled him was enough for 
George. 
“ So lie turned homoward and went cheerfully on his way 
by a short cut through narrow streets and lanes that bordered 
oil the Thames. His gardener’s eye discovered all the 
lonely little pots of mignonette in the upper windows of 
the tottering old houses ; and, in the trimmer streets, where 
there were rows of little houses in all shades of white-wash, 
some quiet fresh looking, inhabited by people who kept their 
windows clean, he sometimes saw as many as four flower- j 
pots upon the window sill. Then there were the squares of , 
turf, put, in weekly instalments of six inches, to the credit 
