side taken up with vineries and plant-houses, with which, however,
we have nothing to do, except in so far as they supply us with any
tender or half-hardy plants for our garden-beds. In front of these
houses will be great borders of stocks and mignonette, scenting the
air—the mignonette sweetest when the sun is strongest, and the stocks
as evening falls. Broad walks and thick hedges of yew, or privet, or
the tree-box, divide the flower from the kitchen garden; and where
the walks intersect, there may perhaps be an old-fashioned pond with
aquatic plants or a fountain; and here let me say that the rarer
aquatic plants might be much more grown than they are at present, and
of all none is more charming than the _Aponogeton distachyon_, with
its little scent-laden boats of blossom. Every available garden wall
will be covered with fruit-trees, beautiful in spring time with the
pink flowers of peach and nectarine, or the white bloom of pear and
cherry. Near the vineries will probably be the flower garden, divided
into small beds by narrow gravel walks, and with long strips of garden
stretching down along the side of the vegetables or gooseberry bushes,
so that even here there will be something of fragrance and of beauty.
Even the kitchen-garden itself may be so arranged as to keep the more
homely kail-yard out of sight. The graceful plumes of asparagus, the
broad grey leaves of the globe artichoke, the trailing luxuriance of
the gourd, and above all the festoons of scarlet runners (especially
when trained along strings fastened to a centre pole so as to form
cones or tents) are anything but unsightly; then a corner should
be found for a small herb-garden, with little patches of sage and
marjoram, and thyme and mint and fennel. There should be rosemary too,
and tansy for Easter Sunday, and borage to supply a blue flowering
sprig for claret-cup.
When we come to the flower-beds themselves, we have an almost infinite
variety of flowers from which to choose for their adornment. In old
days, when the tulips were over, there were beds of anemones and
ranunculus—and a bed of ranunculus when the sun shines full upon the
scarlet petals is a glorious sight. Then came annuals and herbaceous
plants. Now, as each year brings something new, and the old plants, if
out of fashion, can yet generally be procured, our difficulty is the
difficulty of selection.
We have already quoted Harrison’s description of his Elizabethan
garden, but it is of course in the old English Herbals that we find
the fullest account of what was grown, whether for beauty or for use.
The most famous of these are the _Grete Herbal_, by Peter Treveris,
published in 1516, and Turner’s _Herbal_, with the date of 1568; but
better known than either are Gerard’s _Herbal_, of which the first
edition appeared in 1597, and Parkinson’s _Paradisus Terrestris_,
published in 1629, and dedicated to Henrietta Maria. An early chapter
in Parkinson is taken up with the various edgings for “knots and
trayles,” and he says, “the one are living herbes, and the others are
dead materials, as leade, boords, bones, tyles, &c.” Among “living
herbes” he mentions thrift as having been “most anciently received,”
lavender, cotton, and slips of juniper or yew; but on the whole he
recommends “French or Dutch boxe.” His flowers, he divides into English
and “outlandish” flowers, and his list is extensive enough for a good
garden of to-day. “Of daffodils,” he writes, “there are almost a
hundred sorts;” and his list of “tulipas,” as he calls them, extends
over several pages, and is at least as full as a modern nurseryman’s
catalogue.
Two hundred and fifty years have passed since this was written, and
innumerable new varieties and species have since been introduced. To
name no others, we have the annuals of California and the flowering
shrubs of Japan, the heliotrope of Peru, the fuchsia of Chili, and the
dahlia of Mexico. But the illustrated pages of Curtis, of Sweet, and
of Loudon, will help us in our choice of flowers, whether annuals or
herbaceous plants. It is impossible to do more than recall the names of
some of the oldest favourites: and first among the flowers of the year
is the Christmas rose. “I saw,” quaintly says old Sir Thomas Browne’s
son, writing in 1664, “I saw black hellebore in flower which is white;”
and certainly clusters of the large Christmas rose, especially when the
slight protection of a bell-glass has been given to them, are hardly
less beautiful than the Eucharis itself.[8] Then come the snowdrops,
which should be planted not only on the border, but on some bit of
grass, where they may remain undisturbed till the leaves have died
away. There is a delightful passage in Forbes Watson’s _Flowers and
Gardens_ (and Ruskin himself has hardly entered into the secret life of
plants more sympathetically), in which, speaking of the first snowdrop
of the year, he says:
“In this solitary coming forth, which is far more beautiful when we
chance to see it thus amidst the melting snow rather than on the
dark bare earth, the kind little flower, however it may gladden us,
seems itself to wear an aspect almost of sorrow. Yet wait another day
or two till the clouds have broken and its brave hope is accomplished,
and the solitary one has become a troop, and all down the garden
amongst the shrubs the little white bunches are dancing gaily in
the breeze. Few flowers undergo such striking change of aspect, so
mournful in its early drooping, so gladsome when full blown and
dancing in the sunshine.”
The crocus comes next, the same crocus that once “brake like fire”
at the feet of the three goddesses, whom poor Œnone saw on Ida. This
should always be planted, not in thin lines, but in thick clusters,
for only then can be seen the wonderful rich depths of colour, which
open out to the sun. Tufts of crocus, too, should spring up beneath
the branches of deciduous or weeping trees, where the grass is bare
in early spring, and when once planted the crocus seems to go on for
ever. A writer in the _Gardeners’ Chronicle_ says that it is known
that a particular patch of white crocus has been in the same spot for
above 120 years. It is sometimes said that in course of time the yellow
crocus will turn into the coarser and commoner purple crocus. This must
be a mere fallacy, but it sometimes appears as if it were true. The
fact, we take it, is that if the two varieties are placed together the
stronger one will gradually get possession of the ground, and supplant
the more delicate yellow, just as (as old Waterton used to say) the
Hanoverian rats turned out the old brown rat of the country.
Other Spring flowers are far less cultivated in great gardens than in
those of less pretension; but no flowers give more pleasure, both from
their own beauty, and as being among the first flowers of the year.
There are the auricula, or “Basier” (as it is called in Lancashire
ballads), with its velvet petals and its powdered leaves; the double
primrose, faint smelling of the spring; the hepatica, whose bright
little blossoms sparkle like unset gems; the pulmonaria, with blossoms
half blue, half red, and milk-stained leaves, for which sacred legends
can alone account. Then, above all, are the daffodils, most loved of
flowers by the poets, though, once again, in preference to any poet,
as less known yet admirable in their way, I will quote a few words
from Forbes Watson’s book. “The daffodil,” he says, “is a plant which
affords a most beautiful contrast, a cool watery sheet of leaves,
with bright warm flowers, yellow and orange, dancing over the leaves,
like meteors over a marsh.” But we cannot, of course, pass in review
all the flowers of the Spring, though we must urge a claim for such
old-fashioned plants as Solomon’s seal with its palm-like leaves, and
the crown-imperial with its circlet of orange-bells.
To beds of anemone, ranunculus, and tulips we have already referred,
and we need not again recur to ordinary Spring bedding.
But of course there should always be a bank of violets, over which
the soft winds will play, stealing and giving odour; and no less, of
course, a bed of lilies of the valley—planted alone, so that their
roots may spread to any distance—with their sweet white bells peering
here and there from “their pavilion of tender green.”
The herbaceous borders of early summer become gayer still, though the
individual plants are perhaps less interesting. We have now, with
numberless others, the snowflake, the hairy red poppy, the valerian,
mulleins of various sorts, the early gladiolus, the large flowering
lupin, and above all, lilies. The variety of lilies, all beautiful,
and nearly all easily grown, is quite remarkable, and we doubt whether
(comparatively at least) any flower is more neglected.
Then come roses, and we would strongly recommend that, in addition to
the newer “remontant” roses, the old roses and the old way of growing
them should not be quite forgotten. Standard roses are all very well,
but a rosebush covered over with blossom is very often much better.
“Madame Rothschild” is pre-eminent in beauty, but (if she will tolerate
the “odorous” comparison) the old cabbage rose or moss rose has a
charm of scent and of association of which their fashionable rival is
entirely devoid. The old pink china or monthly rose, which flowers
on from early summer to latest autumn, deserves a bed to itself. It
should be trained and pegged down, as is so constantly done in Belgium
and Holland, and the blue lobelia should be planted in between. A bed
of the yellow briar-rose is still more beautiful, but it lasts for
weeks only instead of months. Other beautiful old summer roses are
the maiden’s blush, the Portland rose, the rose unique, and the rose
Celeste. But no rose, taking all the good qualities of a rose together,
its hardiness, free blooming, beauty, and scent, will surpass the
Gloire de Dijon, though the golden cups of Marshal Niel may be richer
in colour, and the fragrance of La France recalls, as no other rose
does, the luscious fragrance of Oriental otto of roses.
And now, instead of ordinary bedding-out, let me suggest some
garden-beds which are far more effective. One is a bed of _Lilium
auratum_, with heliotrope to fill up the spaces. Another is _Agapanthus
umbellatus_, surrounded by _Lobelia cardinalis_. Then there should
be beds of cannas, of gladiolus, of _Clematis Jackmanni_ trained
over withies, of zinnias, of the new hybrid begonias, and of asters.
Somewhere room should be found for a border of everlastings, and
somewhere for a row of the large red linum. One border may be given
up to annuals, and it is no bad plan to mix the seeds of some twenty
varieties, and let them grow up together as they will. The blue
cornflower should have a piece of ground to itself, and so of course
should the carnations. The white pinks will already have perfumed the
herbaceous border with their aromatic scent, and the sweet-william
and antirrhinum will also have claimed a place. The convolvulus
major should have a chance of climbing upon a trellis, and the
large nasturtium of trailing over a bank; and where the _Tropæolum
speciosum_, which is one of the great ornaments of the gardens at Minto
and elsewhere in Scotland, can be made to flourish in our English
garden, it will be found as beautiful as either.
Above all, no garden should be without its hedge of sweet peas. If
the pods are diligently pulled off, new flowers will be as constantly
thrown out, and the “purfled scarf” of blossoms will remain in beauty
till the first killing frost. It is easy to get a dozen different
shades of colour, and nothing can look gayer, or give a more
delicious scent. Keats—than whom no poet ever described flowers more
accurately—speaks of the sweet pea’s “wings of gentle flush o’er
delicate white,” and of its “taper fingers catching at all things.”
Clumps of hollyhock, crusted over with bloom, should be planted near a
sundial, or (as says the author of the well-known essay on “The Poetry
of Gardening”), “in a long avenue, the double and the single, not too
straitly tied, backed by a dark thick hedge of old-fashioned yew.”
Sunflowers, also in clumps, should stand out here and there, and though
the modern sceptics may tell us that this American plant cannot be the
Clytie of Grecian story, it amply vindicates its name by its large
discs, surrounded by golden rays. Tritomas should hold up their scarlet
maces to the sun, among tufts of the _Arundo conspicua_, or (better
still, if possible) of Pampas grass. Lastly, we must not forget to
plant, for the sake of their delicious scent, as the summer evening
falls, the curious Schizopetalon, and the better known Mathiola, or
night-scented stock.
But, besides its flowers, the garden is alive with other happy forms of
life. The blackbird, as the Laureate tells us, will “warble, eat, and
dwell” among the espaliers; and the thrush, as Mr. Browning reminds us,
“sings each song twice over” from some blossoming pear-tree. Then the
bees are busy all summer long, rifling for themselves the flowers, and
setting for us the fruit. “The butterflies flutter from bush to bush,
and open their wings to the warm sun,” and a peacock or red admiral,
or better still, a humming-bird moth, is always a welcome guest. Only
the other day I heard a delightful story (I wish I were satisfied that
it was a fact) of a lady who got some chrysalises of butterflies from
Italy and elsewhere, and, planting in a corner of her garden the herbs
and flowers in which they most delighted, had hovering around, for many
weeks of summer, these beautiful strange visitors from the south.
One great charm of a garden lies in the certainty that it will never be
the same two years running. If we were only confident that each year
was to be precisely like the last, it may fairly be doubted whether
we could feel the same interest in our task. It is really no paradox
to say, that it is fortunate that gardening should be always more or
less of a struggle, for the very struggle, as should always happen,
has the element of pleasure about it. Each year there will be success
on one side, if something of failure on another. And there are always
difficulties enough. There are difficulties arising from bad seasons,
from climate, or from soil. There are weeds that worry, and seeds
that fail. There are garden pests of every variety. The mice nibble
away the tulip-bulbs: the canker gets into the rosebud, and the green
fly infests the rose. Wire-worms destroy the roots of tender annuals,
and slugs breakfast upon their sprouting leaves. Moles and birds and
caterpillars have each and all their peculiar plans for vexing the
gardener’s heart. Then again certain plants are attacked by special
diseases of their own. The gladiolus turns yellow and comes to nothing,
and a parasitic fungus destroys the hollyhock. And yet, if there were
no difficulties to contend against, no forethought to be exercised,
no ingenuity to be displayed, no enemies to conquer, it is surely
impossible that we could feel the same pleasure and personal triumph
in our success. Then, too, each year the intelligent gardener will
arrange new combinations, grow new varieties of plants, and aim after a
perfection which he can never hope to reach.
But the garden has no less also a scientific interest. Fresh species
of plants are continually enriching our flower-beds, and botanists
are constantly searching the wildest and most remote corners of the
world on behalf of the English stove-house, conservatory, and garden.
They endure untold hardships, and risk many dangers, if only they may
secure some new treasure. Often they have caught deadly fever or met
with fatal accidents in their search, and, true martyrs of science as
they are, they pass away forgotten, except perchance when some unwonted
designation of a plant may recall, not their memory indeed, but their
name. But as one drops off, another will succeed; and so, among far
coral islands of the Pacific, in the tropical recesses of a South
American forest, in the heart of Asiatic mountains, or the unexplored
mysteries of New Guinea, these lovers of nature are at work, labouring
for our pleasure and instruction, and procuring for us new forms of
vegetable life and beauty. And meanwhile science is working at home
in another and a happier way. Not content with finding new species of
plants, she is for ever developing fresh varieties. The art is no new
one, and in old days the simpler minds of men were not quite sure of
its propriety. It was unnatural, they used to say. It is in vain that
Polixenes tells Perdita that there is an art that does mend nature,
and, therefore, is nature. She evidently thinks it all sophistry, and
not a gillyflower will she have.
“I’ll not put
The dibble in the earth to set one slip of them.”
And so, too, Andrew Marvell’s mower complains of the gardener that
“The pink grew then as double as his mind;
The nutriment did change the kind;
With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flowers themselves were taught to paint.”
He thinks it a wicked extravagance, as it certainly was, to sell a
meadow for the sake of a tulip root, and he thinks it an absurdity, as
it certainly was not, that we should have brought the “Marvel of Peru”
over so many miles of ocean; but all this might be forgiven, but not
the “forbidden mixtures” which grafting and hybridizing have brought
about. Meanwhile, as we are now untroubled by such scruples, we may
not only enjoy the results of the art of the skilful florist, but may
even take an intelligent interest in the art itself. It lets us into
many secrets of nature. It helps to explain problems of much higher
significance than the brief existence of a garden flower. It makes us
understand, in some small degree, how, in every form of life, a higher
type may be produced from one of inferior order.
And the results are really wonderful. It is difficult to know what
class of plants has in late years most profited by the artful nature,
or unnatural art, of the skilful gardener; but certainly, some of the
most striking successes have been among roses, clematis, begonias, and
rhododendrons.
But it is not the florist only who has been helping on the cause of
botanical science at home. Within the last few years the botanists,
or rather perhaps the naturalists, have been increasingly busy among
both the English field and garden flowers. The old botanists indeed
had examined with every minuteness the structure and economy of the
blossoms, had counted the stamens and the pistils, and known the origin
of the swelling of the seed-vessel. And what Linnæus had systematized,
Erasmus Darwin endeavoured to turn into a romance. Science was to be
made popular in a long didactic poem, and _The Loves of the Plants_ was
the curious result. But to treat the various organs of a plant as if
they were human beings and endowed with human passions, was obviously
too far-fetched a conceit to give real pleasure, and it was not
wonderful that Mathias, and many others, should have laughed at those,
who
“In sweet tetrandrian monogynian strains
Pant for a pistil in botanic pains.”
And then the illustrators took the matter up, and in Thornton’s _New
Illustrations of the Sexual System of Linnæus_, which is perhaps one
of the most beautiful botanical works ever published, we have pictures
of plants with Cupid aiming a shaft at them, and with a letterpress
of love-verses. Into the new system introduced by Jussieu, and now
generally adopted for purposes of classification, we need not enter.
The Natural system, as it is called, which is certainly the sensible
system, has now held its own for many years, though the more artificial
system of Linnæus has still its use and votaries.
The most recent investigators into botanical science are not
classifying plants, but they are examining into the meaning of their
structure. The mere task of description and enumeration has been done,
and so they have set themselves to find out why certain structures
exist, and why certain habits (if we may use the word) have been
formed. Why do the climbing plants climb at all? and why do some
twine, and others cling? Why do the fly-catching plants cause the
death of numbers of unlucky insects? Why are the stamens and pistils
in plants of such various lengths and sizes? Why have some flowers
a hairy fringe, and others drops of nectar in their calyces? What
is the meaning of the scent of flowers, and what is the object of
the night-opening flowers? The key to many of these questions is
in the relationship of flowers to insects; and Charles Darwin, Sir
John Lubbock, and others, have done very much to explore and then to
popularize the subject. Much that is most important has thus been
made known to us, but these eminent naturalists would be the first to
own that there is much more still to do. The secrets of nature open
out but slowly, and after long and patient wooing. It would sometimes
appear too as if there might be danger, not indeed of adapting facts
to theory, but of taking it too readily for granted that all facts
must eventually fit into some favourite theory. This tendency may not
be so apparent in the leaders as in their less cautious disciples in
these scientific researches. From some of their expressions they would
almost seem to imply that insects were made for the sake of fertilizing
flowers. They attribute the bright colour and beauty of flowers not
to the same good purpose that gives beauty elsewhere, but as if it
were merely that insects may be attracted, and do their duty among the
ripening pollen. They are contemptuous at the idea of a flower being
intended for the selfish pleasure of man and not for its own purposes,
and they point to plants of beauty that “blush unseen” where man
cannot admire them, forgetting, however, that man _has_ seen them, or
he would not know of their existence. They will learn nothing of the
affluence of nature, and nothing is quite accepted unless its use can
be established, though on this principle it is hard to explain why, as
Bishop Hall pointed out long ago, “there is many a rich stone laid up
in the bowels of the earth, many a faire pearle laid up in the bosome
of the sea, that never was seen, nor never shall be.”
It is curious how apparent extremes will meet. The very men who would
most readily throw over the old theological argument of “design,”
which believed that everything was done in the most perfect way for
the most perfect ends, will now in the interests of evolution show
the necessity for each curve of a flower-cup and for each marking on
a petal. We cannot be too thankful to them, if only they will make
their ground sure at every step; but it will not do to generalize too
rapidly. For instance, it has been stated that veins on a flower are
probably guides to lead insects down into the honey-cup below, and that
night-blowing flowers are without them because at night they would be
invisible and useless. Unfortunately, it has since been shown that the
_Œnothera taraxicifolia_, and probably other night-flowers, are deeply
marked with veins. Again, why in some cherry-blossoms is the pistil
longer than the stamens, so that the fertilization must be effected
differently to what it is in the more ordinary varieties, where the
stamens and pistil are of equal length? Why have blossoms gradually
developed properties to attract insects, when it is obvious that
those properties were not originally required for the perpetuation of
the species? Why should some flowers of magnificent size, like the
magnolia, require scent to attract insects, if we must indeed admit
that use and not pleasure is the end and aim of every attraction of the
garden? And if scent is necessary in this case, why is it not so where
the flower is small and insignificant? Why among roses has La France a
delicious perfume, and Baroness Rothschild none?
But such questionings are inevitable as yet: meanwhile facts are
accumulating, and the whole truth, thanks to the patient and laborious
workers of our time, may one day be known.