THE
FLOWER GARDEN.
WITH AN ESSAY OX THE
POETRY OF GARDENING.
V7'
REPRINTED FROM THE 'QUARTERLY REVIEW.'
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1852.
THE following Essay on Flowers appeared originally in the Quarterly Eeview in the year 1842. Though many ad- ditions and corrections might now be made, it has been thought better on the whole to print it almost word for word as it was first published. A Chapter on the Poetry of Gardening, by the same writer, which first appeared in another Miscellany, has been added, as embodying, though under . a somewhat conceited form, the same views of Gardening at greater length.
March, 1852.
0349359
B2
CONTENTS. .
Page Excellence of gardening .... 5
Its patrons 5
Its authors 5
Royal patronage 6
History of gardens 7
The Romans and Greeks.... 9
Schools of gardening 10
Italian 11
French 12
Versailles 12
Extravagancies 13
Dutch 17
English 19
Shenstone 19
Price on the Picturesque.... 20 The formal and the natural
style 22
Modern progress of horti- culture 25
Newspapers 25
Societies 26
Florists 27
Tulipomania 27
Endless varieties 28
Names of flowers 29
Pedantry of gaixleners 31
Orchideous plants 32
Use in manufactures 34
Ferns 35
Ward's glass-cases 36
The sick chamber 38
Curiosities of gardening .... 41
Darwin 41
Floating gardens 43
Travelling gardens 44
Lady-£cardeners 44
Page
Mrs. Loudon 45
Watering 47
Lawns 47
Walks 47
Edgings 49
Progress of gardening 51
Exhibitions of Horticultural
Society 53
Old English style 54
'Poetry of Gardening ' 55
A perfect garden 56
Hollyocks 57
Bromley Hill 57
Site 59
I Hemlock-spruce 60
Berberis 60
| Deodara 61
Herb-garden 62
Maze 63
Mound 63
Bowling-green 63
Oxford gardens 64
Formal style 64
Evelyn's hedge 65
Associations of gardens 66
Lovers of gardens 67
English climate 68
Hybernation of plants 70
Blessings of gardening 72
To all classes 72
Christian teaching 74
To the poor man 75
To the clergy 77
Seedlings 79
Flower-decoration 80
Poetry of Gardening 83
THE FLOWER GAEDEN.
IF Dr. Johnson would not stop to inquire " whether landscape-gardening demands any great powers of the mind," we may surely be excused from the like investigation on the humbler subject of gardening- proper. But whether or not these pursuits demand, certain it is that they have exercised, the talents of as numerous and brilliant an assemblage of great names as any one subject can boast of. Without travelling into distant times or countries, we find among our own philosophers, poets, and men of taste, who have deemed gardening worthy their regard, the names of Bacon, Evelyn, Temple, Pope, Addi- son, Sir William Chambers, Lord Kames, Shenstone, Horace Walpole, Alison, Hope, and Walter Scott. Under the first and last of these authorities, omitting all the rest, we would gladly take our stand in de- fence of any study to which they had given their sanction on paper and in practice. Even in its own exclusive domain, gardening has raised no mean school of literature in the works of Gilpin, Whateley, the Masons, Knight, Price, and Eepton.
Time would fail us to tell of all those royal and
6 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
noble personages whom old Grerarde enumerates in. his ' Herbal ' as having either " loved to live in gar- dens," or written treatises on the subject. We know that Solomon " spoke of plants, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth out of the wall:" — though here the material surpassed the workmanship, for in all his wisdom he discoursed not so eloquently, nor in all his glory was he so richly arrayed, as " one lily of the field." The vegetable drug mithridate long handed down the name of the King of Pontus, its discoverer, " better knowne," says Grerarde, " by his soveraigne Mithridate, than by his sometime speaking two-and-twenty lan- guages." " What should I say," continues the old herbalist, after having called in the authorities of Euax king of the Arabians, and Artemisia queen of Caria, " what should I say of those royal personages, Juba, Attalus, Climenus, Achilles, Cyrus, Masynissa, Semyramis, Dioclesian " — all skilled in " the excel- lent art of simpling ? " We might easily swell the list by the addition of royal patrons of horticulture in modern times. Among our own sovereigns, Elizabeth, James I., and Charles II. are mentioned as having given their personal superintendence to the royal gardens, while a change in the style of lay- ing out grounds is very generally attributed to the accession of William and Mary — though we doubt whether a horticultural genius would have met with any better or more fitting reception from the hero of the Boyne than did the great wit to whom he offered a cornetcy of dragoons. The gardens of Tzarsco-celo
PATRONS OF GARDENING.
and of Peterhoff were severally the summer resorts of Catherine I. and Elizabeth of Russia, where the one amused herself with building a Chinese village, and the other by cooking her own dinner in the summer-house of Monplaisir. There are more thrill- ing associations connected with the Jardin Anglais of the Trianon at Versailles, where some rose-trees yet grow which were planted by Marie Antoinette ; nor will an Englishman easily forget the grounds of Claremont, which yet cherish the memory and the taste of that truly British princess who delighted to superintend even the arrangement of the flowers in the cottage-garden. At the present moment great things are promised at Windsor, both in the orna- mental and useful department ; and we trust that the alterations now in progress, avowedly under the eye of royalty, will produce gardens as worthy of the sovereign and the nation, as is the palace to which they are attached.
Little new is to be said upon the history of gar- dening. Horace Walpole and Daines Barrington have well-nigh exhausted the subject, and all later writers go over the same ground. Beginning with the Eden of our first parents, we have the old stories of the orchard of the Hesperides, and the dragon, and the golden fruit (now explained to be oranges) — the gardens of Adonis — the Happy Isles — the hanging terraces of Babylon — till, with a passing glance at those of Alcinous and Laertes, as described by Homer, we arrive at the Gardens of Epicurus and the Academe of Plato. Roman history brings
8 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
up the rear with the villas of Cicero and Pliny, the fruits of Lucullus, the roses of Psestum, and Caesar's
" Private arbours and new-planted orchards On this side Tiber."
To how different a scene in each of these instances the term " garden " has been applied we have now no time to inquire ; but we may perhaps be allowed, before entering upon the fresher and more inviting scene of the English parterre, to say one word in correction of an error common to all writers on the horticulture of the ancients. They would have us consider all classical gardens as little more than kitchen-gardens or orchards — to use the expression of Walpole, " a cabbage and a gooseberry -bush." This is a great mistake. The love of flowers is as clearly traceable in the poets of antiquity as in those of our own times, and their allusions to them plainly show that they were cultivated with the greatest care. Fruit-trees no doubt were mingled with their flowers, but in the formal, or indeed in any style, this might be made an additional beauty. The very order* indeed of their olive-groves had a protecting deity at Athens, and with such exactness did they set out the elms which supported their vines that Virgil compares them to the rank and file of a Roman legion. But the " fair-clustering " f narcis- sus and the " gold-gleaming " crocus were reckoned among the glories of Attica as much as the nightin- gale, and the olive, and the steed ; and the violet J
* Soph. (Ed. Col. 705. f Ibid. 682.
J Aristoph. Equit. 1324. Acharn. 637.
ANCIENT GARDENS — ROMAN— GREEK.
was as proud a device of the Ionic Athenians as the rose of England, or the lily of France. The Ko- mans are even censured by their lyric poet* for allowing their fruitful olive-groves to give place to beds of violets, and myrtles, and all the " wilder- ness of sweets." The first rose of spring f and the " last rose of summer " { have been sung in Latin as well as English. Ovid's description of the Floralia will equal any account we can produce of our May- day ; nor lias Milton himself more glowingly painted the flowery mead of Enna than has the author of the Fasti. Cicero § distinctly enumerates the cultiva- tion of flowers among the delights of the country ; and Virgil |] assures us that, had he given us his Georgic on Horticulture, he would not have for- gotten the narcissus or acanthus, the ivy, the myrtle, or the rose-gardens of Pgestum. The moral which Burns drew from his " mountain daisy " had been marked before both by Virgil Tf and Catullus ; ** and indeed a glance at the Eclogues, the Georgics, or the Fasti, will show the same love of flowers in their authors which evidently animated the great comedian of Greece, where he describes the gentle- men of " merry old Athens " as " redolent of honey- suckle and holidays ;" |f an(l which is so conspicuous in our own Shakspeare as to have led to some late
* Hor. ii. xv. 5. f Virg. Georg. iv. 134.
J Hor. Od. i. xxviii. 3.
§ " Nee vero segetibus solum, et pratis, et vineis, et artmstis res rusticas la?tae sunt, sed etiam in hortis et pomariis ; turn pecudum pastu, apium examinibus, florum omnium varietate." — De Sen., c. 15.
|| Georg. iv. 124. f .En. ix. 435. ** Catull. xi.
•ft <Tfj.i\a.Kos ofav Kal cbrpcry/x.ocn/j'Tjs. Aristoph. Nub. 1007.
10 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
ingenious surmises that he was born and bred a gar- dener.*
Addison amused himself by comparing the dif- ferent styles of gardening with those of poetry — " Your makers of parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers ; contrivers of bowers and grottos, treillages and cascades, are romance- writers ;" while the gravel-pits in Kensington Gar- dens, then just laid out by London and Wise, were heroic verse. If our modern critics were to draw a similar comparison, we suppose our gardens would be divided into the Classical and the Eomantic. The first would embrace the works of the Italian, Dutch, and French, the second those of the Chinese and English schools. The characteristics of the three symmetric styles are not easily to be distinguished, but from the climate and character of the nations, perhaps even more than from the actual examples existing in their respective countries, a division lias
* We may perhaps return to the subject of ancient gardens. Meanwhile, we answer to Daines Barrington's remark, that " he knew of no Greek or Latin word for nosegay," — that the ancients wore their Mowers on their head, not in their bosom ; and there is surely mention enough about " (rretyavoi" and " coronce." But we need hardly wonder at such an oversight in an author who, noticing the passages on flowers in our early poets, makes no allusion to Shakspeare. To H. Walpole, who says, " their gardens are never mentioned as affording shade and shelter from the rage of the dog-star," we can now only quote —
" Spissa ramis laurea fervidos
Excludet ictus ;" and
— " platanum potantibus umbram ;"
and Hor. ii. xi. 13. The platanus was the newly introduced garden- wonder of the Augustan age.
SCHOOLS OF GARDENING. 11
been made which is recognised in most works 011 gardening, and may be useful in practice in keeping us to that " leading idea " on which the critics insist so strongly, but which has been sadly neglected in most modern examples.
The Italian style is undoubtedly the offspring, or rather the continuation, of the xystus and quincunx of the ancient Eomans. With them the garden was only the amplification of the house : if indeed their notion of a villa did not almost sink the consideration of the roofed rooms in the magnificence of the colon- nades and terraces that surrounded them. The same spirit has animated the style of modern Italy. The garden immediately about the house is but the ex- tension of the style and materials of which the build- ings themselves are composed. Broad paved ter- races— and, where the ground admits of them, tiers rising one above the other — vases and statues (not half hidden in a shrubbery, or indiscriminately scat- tered over a lawn, but) connected, and in character with the house itself — these, with marble fountains and such relics of antiquity as may have been dis- covered in the neighbourhood, form the chief beau- ties of the magnificent gardens of Italy, which have in many instances swallowed up the whole wealth of their princely possessors. Spite of Walpole's sneer about " walking up and down stairs in the open air," we own that there are to us few things so beautiful in art as stately terraces, tier above tier, and bold flights of stone steps, now stretching forward in a broad unbroken course, now winding round the
12 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
angle of the terrace in short and steep descents, each landing affording some new scene, some change of sun or shade — a genial basking-place, or cool retreat — here the rich perfume of an ancestral* orange- tree, there the bright blossom of some sunny creeper — while at another turn a balcony juts out to catch some distant view, or a recess is formed with seats for the loitering party to " rest and be thankful." Let all this be connected by colonnades with the architec- ture of the mansion, and you have a far more rational appendage to its necessarily artificial character than the petty wildernesses and picturesque abandon which have not been without advocates up to the very threshold.
Isola Bella, the creation of Vitaliano Borromeo, may be considered as the extravagant type of the Italian style. A barren rock, rising in the midst of a lake, and producing nothing but a few poor lichens, has been converted into a pyramid of terraces, sup- ported on arches, and ornamented with bays and orange-trees of amazing size and beauty.
The French are theatrical even in their gardens. There is an effort after spectacle and display which, while it wants the grace of the Italians, is yet free from the puerilities of the Dutch. The gardens of Versailles may be taken as the great exemplar of this style ; and magnificent indeed they are, if ex- pense and extent and repetition suffice to make up
* There are in Holland many orange-trees which have been in the same family 200 and 300 years ; one at Versailles has the inscription "Sam* en 1421."
ITALIAN — FREXCH. 13
magnificence. Two hundred acres and two hundred millions of francs were the materials which Louis XIV. handed over ;to Le Notre, wherewith to con- struct them. To draw petty figures in dwarf-box, and elaborate patterns in particoloured sand, might well be dispensed with where the formal style was carried out with such magnificence as this, but other- wise the designs of Le Notre differ little from that of his predecessors in the Geometric style, save in their monstrous extent. This is the " grand man- ner " of which Batty Langley, in his ' New Prin- ciples of Gardening,' published in 1728, has given such extraordinary specimens. We wish it were only possible for us to transfer a few of his designs to these pages, that the absurdity of that fashion might be fully shown up. Some notion may be formed of his system from his starting with the prin- ciple that the " true end and design of laying out gardens of pleasure is, that we may never know when we have seen the whole." * The great wonder of Versailles was the well-known labyrinth, not such a maze as is really the source of much idle amuse- ment at Hampton Court, but a mere ravel of inter- minable walks, closely fenced in with high hedges, in which thirty-nine of JEsop's Fables were repre- sented by painted copper figures of birds and beasts, each group connected with a separate fountain, and
* Brown — who, though an uneducated man, and alluded to, we suppose, by Sir W. Chambers where he speaks of " peasants emerging from the melon-ground to take the periwig and turn professor,"" left many good sayings behind him — used to say of these tortuous walks, that you might put one foot upon zig and the other upon z-tg.
14 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
all spouting water out of their mouths. A more dull and fatuous notion it never entered into the mind of bloated extravagance to conceive.*
Every tree was here planted with geometrical exactness, — parterre answered to parterre across half a mile of gravel, —
" Grove nods to grove, each alley has its brother, And half the garden just reflects the other."
" Such symmetry," says Lord Byron, " is not for solitude ;" and certainly the gardens of Versailles were not planted with any such intent. The Pari- sians do not throng there for the contemplation to be found in the " trim gardens " of Milton. There is indeed a melancholy, but not a pleasing one, in wandering alone through those many acres of formal hornbeam, where we feel that it requires the gal- liard and clinquant air of a scene of Watteau — its crowds and love-making — its hoops and minuets — a ringing laugh and merry tambourine — to make us recognise the real genius of the place. Taking Versailles as the gigantic type of the French school, it need scarcely be said that it embraces broad gra-
* Some idea may be formed of the more than childishness of the thing from a contemporary account : — " These waterworks represent several of ^Esop's Fables : the animals are all of brass, and painted in their proper colours ; and are so well assigned, that they seem to be in the very action the Fable supposes them in, and the more so, for that they cast water out of their mouths, alluding to the form of speech the Fable renders them in." Here follows the description of a particular fountain. " Fable XIII. The Fox and the Crane. — Upon a rock stands a Fox with the Crane ; the Fox is lapping somewhat on a flat gilded dish, the water spreads itself in the form of a table- cloth ; the Crane by way of complaint spouts up water into the air :" and so on through thirty-eight others. — Versailles Illustrated, 1726.
VERSAILLES. 15
veiled terraces, long alleys of yew and hornbeam, vast orangeries, groves planted in the quincunx style, and waterworks embellished with, and con- ducted through, every variety of sculptured orna- ment. It takes the middle line between the other two geometric schools ; admitting more sculpture and other works of art than the Italian, but not overpowered with the same number of " huge masses of littleness " as the Dutch. There is more of pro- menade, less of parterre ; more gravel than turf ; more of the deciduous than of the evergreen tree. The practical water-wit of drenching the spectators was in high vogue in the ancient French gardens ; and Evelyn, in his account of the Duke of Richelieu's villa, describes with some relish how " on going, two extravagant musketeers shot at us with a stream of water from their musket-barrels." Contrivances for dousing the visitors — " especially the ladies " — which once filled so large a space in the catalogue of every show-place, seem to militate a little against the national character for gallantry ; but the very fact that everything was done to surprise the spectator and stranger evinces how different was the French idea of a garden from the home and familiar pleasures which an Englishman looks to in his. Paintings on a large scale, and illusive perspectives* at the end
* An instance of these " agreeable deceptions," perfectly character- istic of the French taste of the day, may he given from Evelyn's tour: — " In the Rue de la Seine is a little garden, which, though very narrow, by the addition of a well-painted perspective is to ap- pearance greatly enlarged ; to this there is another part, supported by arches, in which runs a stream of water, rising in the aviary, out a
16 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
of their avenues, may be ranked among their charac- teristic embellishments.
But during the madness of the Revolution, gar- dens of course could not be allowed alone to remain unaltered ; and as Reason and Nature were to carry everything before them, here too the English style was of course adopted with the same amount of en- thusiasm and of intelligence as they showed in taking up the democratic parts of our constitution, Ermc- nonville, the seat of Viscomte Girardin, was the- lirst place of consequence laid out in the natural style, and a more complete specimen of French adaptation was never heard of. We have not space even to glance at half its charms ; but some idea of the genius loci may be conveyed from the fact that " a garden in ruins " was one of its lions. And it seems tluit the Viscomte kept a band of musicians continually moving about, now on water, now on land, to draw the attention of visitors to the right points of view at the right time of the day; while Madame and her daughters, in a sweet mixture of the natural, the revolutionary, and the romantic, promenaded the grounds, dressed in brown stuff, " en amazones" with black hats ; and the young men wore " habille- ments les plus simples et le plus propres d les faire confondre avec les enfants des campagnards" * One instance, more Frenchified and ridiculous still, was that of the " Moulin Joli" of Watelet. He was a
statue, and seeming to flow for some miles, by being artificially con- tinued in the painting, where it sinks down, at the wall." * Gaz. Lit. de 1' Europe, quoted by Loudon, Encyc., p. 80.
DUTCH. 17
writer of a system of gardening on utilitarian prin- ciples ; but, having erected divers temples and altars about his grounds, he felt himself bound, in consis- tency with his theory, to employ occasionally troops of sacrificers and worshippers, to give his gimcrack pagodas and shrines the air of utility ! In good keeping with this garden was the encomium of the Prince de Ligne. " Allez-y, incredules ! Meditez sur les inscriptions que le gout y a dictees. Me- ditez avec le sage, soupirez avec Vamant, et benissez Watelet."
The line of demarcation between the Dutch and French styles is perhaps more imaginary than real. The same exact symmetry everywhere prevails. There is a profusion of ornaments, only on a smaller scale, —
" Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees," —
with stagnant and muddy canals and ditches, pur- posely made for the bridge that is thrown over them ; but they abound also in the pleasanter accompani- ments of grassy banks and slopes, green terraces, caves, waterworks, banque ting-houses set on mounds, with a profusion of trellis-work and green paint — " furnished," in the words of Evelyn, " with what- ever may render the place agreeable, melancholy, and country-like," not forgetting " a hedge of jets d'eau surrounding a parterre."
In the neighbourhood of Antwerp is a lawn with sheep — like the gray wethers of Salisbury Plain — of stone, and shepherd and dog of the same material to
18 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
match. Generally, however, the scissors and the yew-tree make up the main " furniture " of the garden; and there is something so venerable, and even classical,* about cones and pyramids, and pea- cocks of box and yew, that we should be loth to destroy a single specimen of the topiary art that was not in flagrant disconnection with the scene around it.
However, the most striking and indispensable feature of a private garden in the Dutch style is the " lust-huis," or pleasure-house, hundreds of which overlook every public road and canal in Holland. Perched on the angle of the high wall of the en- closure, or flanking or bestriding the stagnant canal- ulet which bounds the garden, in all the gaiety and cleanliness of fresh paint, these little rooms form the resort, in summer and autumn evenings, of the owners and their families, who, according to sex and age, indulge themselves with pipes and beer, tea and gossip, or in observing the passengers along the high road, — -while these, in their turn, are amused with the amiable and pithy mottoes on the pavilions, which set forth the " Pleasure and Ease," " Friend- ship and Sociability," &c. &c., of the family-party within.
We have thought it necessary to give a slight sketch of the principal continental styles, before we entered upon the consideration of that which is universally recognised as appropriate to the English garden. In a former number of our Review a his-
* See Pliny and Martial — we may say passim.
ENGLISH — SHENSTWE. 19
tory of the changes that have passed over English gardens was given, in his usual happy manner, by Sir Walter Scott, which precludes the necessity of more than a passing reference to the same subject. London and Wise were among the earliest innovators on the old Dutch school in England, and received the high praise of Addision in the ' Spectator,' for the introduction of a more natural manner in Ken- sington Gardens, then newly laid out. Bridgeman followed, laying the axe to the root of many a ver- durous peacock and lion of Lincoln-green. Kent, the inventor of the Ha-ha, broke through the visible and formal boundary, and confounded the distinction between the garden and the park. Brown, of " capa- bility " memory, succeeded, with his round clumps, boundary belts, semi-natural rivers, extensive lakes, broad green drives, with the everlasting portico sum- mer-house at the end. Castle Howard, Blenheim, and Stowe, were the great achievements of these times ; while the bard of the Leasowes was creating his sentimental farm, " rearing," says Disraeli, " hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and winding waters,"
" And, having shown them where to stray, Threw little pebbles in their way ;"
displaying — according to the English rhymes of a noble foreigner who raised a "plain stone" to the memory of " Shenstone" — " a mind n&tural," in laying out "Arcadian greens rural."*
* Dr. Johnson, who, we think, used to boast either that he did or did not (and it is much the same) know a cabbage from a cabbage-
C 2
20 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
Whateley's book completed the revolution. It was instantly translated into French, the " Anglo- manie " being then at its height ; and though the clipped pyramids and hedges did not fall so reck- lessly as in England, yet no place of any pretension was considered perfect without the addition of its " jardin Anglais."* The natural style was now for some time, in writings and practice, completely triumphant. At length came out ' Price on the Picturesque,' who once more drew the distinction between the parterre and the forest, in opposition to the straggling, scrambling style, which Whateley called " combining the excellences of the garden and the park."
From the times of Socrates and Epicurus to those of Wesley, Simeon, and Pusey, the same story of Master and Scholars is to be told ; and if theology
rose, has a passage in his ' Life of Shenstone ' so perfectly Johnsonian that we must transcribe it : — " Now was excited his delight in rural pleasures, and his ambition of rural elegance. He began from this time to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters ; which he did with such judgment and such fancy, as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful — a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view — to make water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen — to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden — demand any great powers of the mind, I will not inquire : perhaps a surly and sullen spectator may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason. But it must at least be confessed that to embellish the form of nature is an innocent amusement, and some praise must be allowed by the most scrupulous observer to him who does best what multitudes are contending to do well."
* Horace Walpole's description of M. Boutin's garden.
PKICE ON THE PICTURESQUE. 21
and philosophy could not escape, how should poor gardening expect to go free ? It is the natural effect of the bold enunciation of a broad principle, that it will oftener be strained to cover extreme cases than be applied to the general bearing of the subject. Withdraw the pure and intelligent mind that first directed its application, and hundreds of professed disciples and petty imitators spring up, whose optics are sharp-sighted enough to see the faults condemned in the old system, though their comprehension is too limited to embrace the whole range of truth and beauty in the new ; with just so much knowledge as to call up a maxim or phrase for the purpose of distorting it, and passing it on the world as the ipse dixit of the master, though without intellect enough to perceive the time, the measure, or the place, which alone make its application desir- able. Wilkes was at much trouble to assure George III. that he was not a Wilkite ; and if many an ordinary man has need at times to exclaim, " Pre- serve me from my friends," all great ones have much more reason to cry out, " Defend me from my dis- ciples." Perhaps all this is a little too grandiloquent for our humble subject ; but if a marked example of discipular ultraism and perversion were wanting, no stronger one could be found than that supplied by the followers of Price. And if we have made more of this matter than it deserves, we care not, for our great object is to impress upon our readers that this unfortunate word " picturesque " has been the ruin of our gardens. Price himself never dreamt of ap-
22 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
plying it, in its present usage, to the plot of ground immediately surrounding the house. His own words are all along in favour of a formal and artificial character there, in keeping with the mansion itself; and, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, he expresses in a tone of exquisite feeling his regret at his own de- struction of a garden on the old system. He might, indeed, have used the term picturesque with refer- ence to those splendid terraces, arcades, and balconies of Italy with which we are familiar in the archi- tectural pictures of Panini ; but he would have shrunk with horror to have his theory applied to justify the substitution of tadpole, and leech, and comma, and sausage designs for the trim gardens of symmetrical forms, even though he might see in the latter (as Addison says) " the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush."
Scott very justly finds fault with the term " land- scape gardening," which is another that has proved fatal to our parterres. If such a word as " land- scaping " be inadmissible, it is high time to find some phrase which will express the laying out of park scenery, as completely distinct from " garden- ing " as the things themselves are.
Though it may be questioned whether a picture should be the ultimate test of the taste in laying out gardens and grounds, Price, even on this view, offers some very ingenious arguments in defence not only of Italian but even of the old English garden ; and his feelings would evidently have led him still further to adopt the formal system, had his theory not stood
NUTURAL STYLE. 23
a little in the way. He seems to recognise a three- fold division of the domain — the architectural terrace and flower-garden in direct connection with the house, where he admits the formal style ; the shrub- bery or pleasure-ground, a transition between the flowers and the trees, which he would hand over to the " natural style " of Brown and his school ; and, thirdly, the park, which he considers the proper domain of his own system. This is a distinction which it would be well for every proprietor to keep in view, not for the sake of a monotonous adherence to its divisions in every case, but in order to remem- ber that the tree, the shrub, and the flower, though they may be occasionally mingled with effect, yet require a separate treatment, and the application of distinct principles, where they are to be exhibited each in its full perfection. Our present subject of complaint is the encroachments which the natural and picturesque styles have made upon the regular flower-garden. Manufacturers of by - lanes and lightning-struck cottages are all very well in their own department, but that must not be in the vicinity of the house. We suppose that even Whateley him- self would admit that the steps and threshold of the door must be symmetrical, and would probably allow a straight pathway more appropriate, and even more natural, than a winding one, leading directly to the door of the house. Once get a single straight line, even the outline of the building itself, and it then becomes merely a matter of situation, or convenience, or taste, how far the straight lines and right angles
24 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
shall be extended ; and though nature must needs be removed a few paces further into her own proper retreat, yet simplicity may still remain in regular and symmetrical forms, as much as in undulations and irregularities and mole-hills under the very windows of the drawing-room. Nothing, as Scott has remarked, is more completely the child of art than a garden. It is, indeed, in our modern sense of the term, one of the last refinements of civilised life. " A man shall ever see," says Lord Bacon, " that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely." To attempt, therefore, to disguise wholly its artificial character is as great folly as if men were to make their houses resemble as much as possible the rude- ness of a natural cavern. So much mawkish senti- mentality had been talked about the natural style, that even Price himself dared not assert that a gar- den must be avowedly artificial. And though now it seems nothing strange to hazard such a remark, yet its truth still requires to be brought more boldly and closely home to us before we can expect to see our gardens what they ought to be.
Since the publication of Price's book no writer has appeared advocating any particular theory or system of gardening. Principles and practice have become of a like composite order, and in general it has been left to the gardener to adopt, at his own pleasure, the stucco and cast-iron and wire orna- ments, that fashion has from time to time produced, to suit the last importations or the favourite flower
PROGRESS OF HORTICULTURE. 25
of the season. The early part of the nineteenth century presents a great coolness in the garden mania with which the eighteenth was so possessed ; and it was hardly till after the peace that public attention again took this direction. We presume that it will only be in the philosophical fashion of the day to say that this was a natural reaction of the public mind, after the turmoil of a foreign war, to fall back upon the more peaceful occupations of home. The institution of the Horticultural Society of London, however, took place a little earlier, and it no doubt gave both a stimulus and a stability to the growing taste of the nation.
It may be amusing to run over some few statistics of the progress of horticulture since that time. It is now only thirty-three years since the foundation of the London Society, the first comprehensive institu- tion of its kind : there are now in Great Britain at least 200 provincial societies, founded more or less upon its model. We find merely in the ' Gardener's Chronicle ' for last year notices of the exhibitions of 120 different Societies. Everything else connected with gardening has increased in the like proportion. There were at that time not more than two botanical — and those strictly scientific — periodical works : there are now at least twenty monthly publications, each entirely devoted to some branch or other of botany or horticulture ; and, what may perhaps still more surprise those of our readers who live apart from the influence of the gardening world, there are, or were very lately, published every week three
26 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
newspapers professedly monopolised by horticultural subjects. Even during the last year two new So- cieties have sprung up in the metropolis — the Lon- don Floricultural and the Royal Botanic — each taking a line of its own, distinct though not antagonistically so, from that of any previously formed institution ; and both, we believe, prospering, and likely to prosper.
Many of" our readers, who have heard of a fashion- able, and a scientific, and a sporting, and (stranger name still !) a religious WORLD, may perhaps be in unhappy ignorance of the floricultural one. But such indeed there is, with its own leaders, language, laws, exclusiveness — nay, even its party bitternesses and personal animosities. And shameful indeed it is that such pure and simple objects should be the source of the unseemly quarrels and bickerings which are too often obtruded into floricultural publications ; that men should extract " envy and malice and all uncharitablencss " out of " the purest of all human pleasures " —
" Even as those bees of Trebizond, —
Which from the sunniest flowers that glad With their pure smile the garden round Draw venom forth that drives men mad ! "
—Lalla Rookh.
The division of labour, both in the horticultural and floricultural world, is carried to an extent that the uninitiated little dream of. There are not only express exhibitions for each particular plant that has been adopted into the family of " florist's flowers " — as for the tulip, dahlia, pink, and heartsease — but
SOCIETIES — CLUBS — FLORISTS. 27
there are actually several existing " cucumber clubs" and "celery societies;" and, within a very short period, four or five treatises have been published on the culture of the cucumber alone. Then we must speak of the "flake" of the carnation — the "edging" of the picotee — the "crown" and the "lacing" of the pink — the "feather and flame" of the tulip— the "eye and depth" of the dahlia — the "tube, the truss, and the paste" of the auricula — and the "pencil" and "blotch" of the pansy. Besides these peculiar pets of the fancy, there are the old- fashioned polyanthus, the ranunculus, the geranium, the calceolaria, the chrysanthemum, and the hyacinth, which are also under the especial patronage of the florists ; and, lately, the iris, the gladiolus, the fuchsia, and the verbena may be considered as added to the list.
The tulipomania of Holland is well known : it was at its height in the year 1637, when one bulb — its name is worth preserving — " the Viceroy" — was sold for 4203 florins ; and for another, called " Semper Augustus," there were offered 4600 florins, a new carriage, a pair of grey horses, and a complete set of harness ! *
The florimania, as it has been called — we should rather say "anthomania" — has never reached so ridiculous a height in England, nor, with all our
* At the sale of Mr. Clarke's tulips at Croydon, in the year 1836, 100?. was given for a single bulb, " Fanny Kemble ;'' and from 51. to 1QL is no uncommon price for the new and choice sorts. We see also frequent advertisements of geraniums and dahlias, the first year of their " coming out," at the like price.
THE FLOWER GARDEN.
love for flowers, is it likely to do so, though there are staid men of business among us who would doubtless be amazed at the sums of money even now occasionally lavished on a single plant. A noble Duke, munificent in his patronage of horticulture, as in everything else, and who — though till quite lately, we believe, ignorant of the subject — now understands it as thoroughly as he appreciates it, is said to have given one hundred guineas for a single specimen of an orchideous plant ; and we know of another peer, not quite so wise in this or perhaps other matters, who, seeing a clump of the rich and gorgeous double-flowering gorse, instantly gave his gardener an order for fifty pounds' worth of it !
Before we have done with the florists and botanists, we must say one word about their nomenclatures. As long as the extreme vulgarity of the one and the extreme pedantry of the other continue, they must rest assured that they will scare the majority of this fastidious and busy world from taking .any great interest in their pursuits. Though " a rose by any other name will smell as sweet," there is certainly enough to prejudice the most devoted lover of flowers ;i irainst one that comes recommended by some such de- signation as " Jim Crow," or " Metropolitan purple,'' or " King Boy," or " Yellow Perfection." When indeed calceolarias and pansies increase to 2000 " named varieties," there must of course be some difficulty in finding out an appropriate title for every new upstart ; but in this case the evil lies deeper than the mere name: it consists in puffing and
NAMES OF FLOWERS. 29
palming off such seedlings at all, half of which are either such counterparts of older flowers that nothing but the most microscopic examination would detect a difference, or else so utterly worthless as to be fit only to be thrown away. This is an increasing evil ; and if anything gives a check to the present growing taste for choice flowers, it will arise from the dis- honesty and trickery of the trade itself.
Meanwhile, let there be at least some propriety in the names given. We cannot quite agree with Mr. Loudon, who seems to approve of such names as " Claremont-nuptials primrose" and "Afflicted- queen carnation !" though they do point to the years 1816 and 1821 as the dates of their respective ap- pearances : neither will we aver that Linnaeus was not something too fanciful in naming his " Andro- meda," * and in calling a genus Bauhinia, from two illustrious brothers of the name of Bauhin, because it had a double leaf; but surely there is marked cha- racter enough about every plant to give it some simple English name, without drawing either upon
* The following is his reason for thus naming this delicate shrub, one of those bog-plants not half so much cultivated as it deserves to be : — " As I contemplated it, I could not help thinking of Andro- meda, as described by the poets — a virgin of most exquisite beauty and unrivalled charms. The plant is always fixed in some turfy hil- lock in the midst of the swamps, as Andromeda herself was chained to a rock in the sea, which bathed her feet, as the fresh water does the root of the plant. As the distressed virgin cast down her blushing face through excessive affliction, so does the rosy-coloured flower hang its head, growing paler and paler till it withers away. At length comes Perseus, in the shape of summer, dries up the surrounding waters, and destroys the monsters, rendering the damsel a fruitful mother, who then carries her head erect." — Tour in Lapland, June llth.
30 . THE FLOWER GARDEN.
living characters or dead languages. It is hard work, as even Miss Mitford has found it, to make the maurandias, and alstrsemerias, and eschscholtzias — the commonest flowers of our modern gardens — look passable even in prose. They are sad dead letters in the glowing description of a bright scene in June. But what are these to the pollopostemono- petalas and eleutheromacrostemones of Wachendorf, with such daily additions as the native name of iztactepotzacuxochitl icohueyo, or the more classical ponderosity of Erisymum PerofFskyanum ? —
" — like the verbum Grsecum Spermagoraiolekitholakanopolides, Words that should only be said upon holidays, When one has nothing else to do."
As to poetry attempting to immortalize a modern bouquet, it is utterly hopeless ; and if our cultivators expect to have their new varieties handed down to posterity, they must return to such musical sounds as buglosse, and eglantine, and primrose, before bards will adopt their pets into immortal song. We per- ceive some attempt made lately in Paxton's Maga- zine and the better gardening journals to render the names somewhat more intelligible by Englishing the specific titles, as Passiflora Middletoniana — Mid- dleton's Passion-ilower, and the like ; but this is not enough : the combination of a little observation and taste would soon coin such names as " our plainer sires " gave in " larkspur," and " honeysuckle," and " bindweed," or even in " ladies'-smocks," and "ragged-robin," and "love-lies-bleeding."
GARDENING PEDANTRY — CRABBE. 31
As names run at present, the ordinary amateur is obliged to give up the whole matter in despair, and rest satisfied with the awful false quantities which his gardener is pleased to inflict upon him, who, for his own part, wastes hours and hours over names that convey to him no information, but only serve to puff him up with a false notion of his acquire- ment, when he finds himself the sole possessor of this useless stock of " Aristophanic compounds and insufferable misnomers." Crabbe, whom nothing was too minute to escape, has admirably ridiculed this botanical pedantry :—
" High-sounding words our worthy gardener gets, And at his club to wondering swains repeats ; He there of Rhus and Rhododendron speaks, And Allium calls his onions and his leeks. Nor weeds are now ; from whence arose the weed, Scarce plants, fair herbs, and curious flowers proceed ; Where cuckoo-pints and dandelions sprung (Gross names had they our plainer sires among), There Arums, there Leontodons we view, And Artemisia grows where wormwood grew."
To make confusion worse confounded, our bota- nists are not satisfied with their far-fetched names ; they must ever be changing them too. Thus it is a mark of ignorance in the world of flowers to call our old friend geranium otherwise than Pelargonium ; the Glycine (6r. sinensis) — the well-known specimen of which at the Chiswick Gardens produced more than 9000 of its beautiful, lilac, laburnum-like racemes from a single stem — is now to be called Wistaria : the new Californian annual ^Enothera is already Godetia ; while the pretty little red Hemi-
32 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
meris, once a Celsia, is now, its third designation, an Alonsoa ; and our list is by no means exhausted.*
Going on at this rate, a man might spend the morn of his life in arriving at the present state of botanical science, and the rest of his days in running after its novelties and changes. We are only too glad when public sanction triumphs over individual whim, and, as in the cases of Georgina proposed for Dahlia, and Chryseis for Eschscholtzia, resists the attempted change.
One class of plants, which, though it has lately become most fashionable and cultivated by an almost separate clique of nurserymen and amateurs, cannot yet be said to rank with florists' flowers, is that of the Orchidaceae, trivially known, when first intro- duced, by the . name of air-plants. It is scarcely more than ten years ago that any particular attention was bestowed upon this interesting tribe, and there are now more genera cultivated than there were then species known. Among all the curiosities of botany there is nothing more singular — we had almost said mysterious — than the character, or, to speak more technically, the " habit " of this extraordinary tribe. The sensation which the first exhibition of
* There is a curious perversion of name in the tuberose, which has nothing to do with " tubes " or " roses," but is the conniption of its specific name, Polianthes tuberosa, simply signifying " tuberous :" so Jerusalem artichoke has nothing to do with the hill of Sion, but is vulgarized from the Italian Girasole, sunflower, of which it is a species ; so Mayduke cherry, from Medoc ; and " grass," from aspa- ragus. Gilliflower is probably July-flower ; but it would take an essay to discuss which is the true gilliflower of our great-great- grandmothers.
ORCHIDEOUS PLANTS.
the butterfly-plant (Oncidium papilio) produced at the Chiswick Gardens must still be remembered by many of our readers, and so wonderful is the re- semblance of the vegetable to the insect specimen, floating upon its gossamer-stalk, that even now we can hardly fancy it otherwise than a living creature, were it not even still more like some exquisite pro- duction of fanciful art. Their manner of growth distinct from, though so apparently like, our native misletoe, and other parasitical plants — generally re- versing the common order of nature, and throwing summersets with their heels upward and head down- ward — one specimen actually sending its roots into the air, and burying its flowers in the soil, — living almost entirely on atmospheric moisture, — the blos- soms in some species sustained by so slender a thread that they seem to float unsupported in the air, — all these things, combined with the most exquisite con- trast of the rarest and most delicate colours in their flowers, are not more extraordinary characteristics of their tribe than is the circumstance that in nearly every variety there exists a remarkable resemblance to some work either of animate nature or of art. Common observation of the pretty specimens of this genus in our own woods and fields has marked this in the names given to the fly, the bee, and the spider-orchis ; * but in the exotic orchises this mi- mickry is still more strongly marked. Besides the butterfly-plant already alluded to, there is the dove-
* These British species are now transferred by botanists to the genus Ophrys.
34 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
plant, and a host besides, so like to other things than flowers, that they seem to have undergone a metamorphosis under the magic wand of some trans- forming power.
Remembering the countries from which most of them come — the dank jungles of Hindostan — the fathomless woods of Mexico — the unapproached valleys of China — one might almost fancy them the remains of the magic influence which tradition affirms of old to have reigned in those wild retreats ; and that, while the diamond palaces of Sarmacand, and the boundless cities of Guatemala, and the colossal temples of Elephanta, have left but a ruin or a name, these fairy creations of gnomes, and sprites, and afreets, and jinns (if so we must call them), being traced on the more imperishable material of Nature herself, have been handed down to us as the last vestiges of a dynasty older and more powerful than European man. It is impossible to view a collection of these magic-looking plants in flower without being carried back to the visions of the Arabian Nights — not indeed wandering in disguise through the streets of Bagdad with Haroun and his vizier (we beg pardon — wezeer), but entering with some adventurous prince the spell-bound palace of some sleeping beauty, or descending with Aladdin into the delicious subterranean gardens of fruits, and jewels, and flowers.
To pass from the romantic to the useful, we can- not do a kinder deed to our manufacturers than to turn their attention to the splendid works of Mr.
USE IN MANUFACTURES. 35
Bateman and Dr. Lindley, dedicated to this class of plants. It is well known how contemporaneous was the cultivation of flowers and manufactures in some of our large cities — (at Norwich, for instance, where the taste yet survives, and where there is a record of a flower-show being held so early as 1687) — the flowers which the foreign artisans brought over with them suggesting at the same time thoughts of years gone by and designs for the work of the hour. Our new schools of design might literally take a leaf — and a flower — out of the books we have mentioned, and improve our patterns in every department of art by studying examples of such exquisite beauty, variety, and novelty of form and colour as the tribe of orchideous plants affords.
Another class of plants, very different from that just mentioned, to which we would call the attention of designers, is that of the Ferns. Though too com- monly neglected by the generality, botanists have long turned their researches towards this extensive and elegant class. These humble denizens of earth can boast their enthusiasts and monographists, as much as the pansy or the rose ; nor has the exquisite tracery of their fronds escaped the notice of the artist and the wayfarer. But few, perhaps, even of those who have delighted to watch the crozier-like germ of the bracken bursting from the ground in spring, and the rich umber of its maturity among the green gorse of autumn, are aware that Britain can produce at least thirty-six distinct species of its own, with a still greater number of subordinate varieties ; these,
D 2
36 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
too, constituting but a very small fraction of the 1508 species which Sadler enumerates in his general catalogue. Mr. Newman, in his recent work,* has figured more than eighty varieties, the natural growth of our own isles alone, and mentions fourteen distinct species found in one chasm at Ponterwyd ! Though some of the tail-piece vignettes of his volume fail in representing — as how could it be otherwise ? — the natural abandon and elegance of this most graceful of all plants, we would still recommend the great variety and beauty of his larger illustrations as much to the artist and manufacturer, and embellisher, as to the fern-collector himself.
Our notice of ferns might seem rather foreign to the subject of ornamental gardening (though we shall have something to say of a fernery by and bye), were it not for the opportunity it affords us of intro- ducing, probably for the first time to many of our readers, a botanical experiment, which, though for some years past partially successful, has but lately been brought to very great perfection for the pur- poses both of use and ornament. We allude to the mode of conveying and growing plants in glass-cases hermetically sealed from all communication with the outer air. There are few ships that now arrive from the East Indies without carrying on deck several cases of this description, belonging to one or other of our chief nurserymen, filled with orchideous plants and other new and tender varieties from the East, which formerly baffled the utmost care to land them
* A History of British Ferns, by E. Newman.
FERNS. 37
here in a healthy state. These cases, frequently furnished by the extreme liberality of Dr. Wallich, the enterprising and scientific director of the Hon. Company's gardens in the neighbourhood of Calcutta, form on shipboard a source of great interest to the passengers of a four-months' voyage, and, after hav- ing deposited their precious contents on our shores, return again by the same ship filled with the common flowers of England,
" That dwell beside our paths and homes,"
which our brethren in the East affectionately value by association above all the brilliant garlands of their sunny sky.
This interchange of sweets was a few years ago almost unattainable, the sea-air and spray, as is well known, being most injurious to every kind of plant ; but their evil effects are now completely avoided by these air-tight cases, which admit no exterior in- fluence but that of light. Without entering into any deep physiological explanation, it may be enough to say that vegetable, unlike animal life, does not exhaust the nutritive properties of air by repeated inhaling and exhaustion ; so that these plants, aided perhaps by the perfect stillness of the confined atmos- phere, so favourable to all vegetation, continue to exist, breathing, if we may so say, the same air, so long as there is moisture enough to allow them to deposit every night a slight dew on the glass, which they imbibe again during the day. The soil is moist- ened in the first instance, but on no account is any
38 THE FLOWER GARDEN,
further water or air admitted. The strangers which we have seen thus transmitted, being chiefly very small portions of succulents and epiphytes, though healthy, have shown no inclination to flourish or blossom in their confinement ; but it must be remem- bered that the temperature on the deck of a ship must be very much lower than what this tribe re- quires, and the quantity of w,ood-work which the cases require to stand the roughness of the voyage, greatly impedes the transmission of light. As soon as the slips are placed in the genial temperature of the orchideous house, they speedily shoot out into health and beauty.
But while this mode of conveyance answers the purposes of science, a much more beautiful adapta- tion of the same principle is contrived for the bed- room garden of the invalid. Who is there that has not some friend or other confined by chronic disease or lingering decline to a single chamber ? — one, we will suppose, who a short while ago was among the gayest and the most admired of a large and happy circle, but now through sickness dependent, after her One staff and stay, for her minor comforts and amuse- ments 011 the angel visits of a few kind friends, a little worsted-work, or a new Quarterly, and, in the absence or dulness of these, happy in the possession of some fresh-gathered flower, and in watering and tending a few pots of favourite plants, which are to her as friends, and whose flourishing progress under her tender care offers a melancholy but instructive contrast to her own decaying strength. Some mild
S GLASS-CASES.
autumn-evening her physician makes a later visit than usual — the room is faint from the exhalations of the flowers — the patient is not so well to-day — he wonders that he never noticed that mignionette and those geraniums before, or he never should have allowed them to remain so long — some weighty words on oxygen and hydrogen are spoken — her poor pets are banished for ever at the word of the man of science, and the most innocent and unfailing of her little interests is at an end. By the next morning the flowers are gone, but the patient is no better ; there is less cheerfulness than usual ; there is a list-- less wandering of the eyes after something that is not there ;* and the good doctor is too much of a philosopher not to know how the working of the mind will act upon the body, and too much of a Christian not to prevent the rising evil if he can ; he hears with a smile her expression of regret for her long-cherished favourites, but he says not a word. In the evening a largish box arrives directed to the fair patient, and superscribed, " Keep this side up- wards — with care." There is more than the common interest of box-opening in the sick chamber. After a little tender hammering and tiresome knot-loosen- ing, Thompson has removed the lid;— and there lies a large oval bell-glass fixed down to a stand of ebony, some moist sand at the bottom, and here and there over the whole surface some tiny ferns are just push- ing their curious little fronds into life, and already
v 5' iv ei Traa' ety>/>o5iVa.— JEscii. Again. 408.
40 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
promise, from their fresh and healthy appearance, to supply in their growth and increase all the beauty and interest of the discarded flowers, without their injurious effects. It is so. These delicate exotics, for such they are, closely sealed down in an air-tight world of their own, flourish with amazing rapidity, and in time produce seeds which provide a generation to succeed them. Every day witnessing some change keeps the mind continually interested in their pro- gress, and their very restriction from the open air, while it renders the chamber wholesome to the in- valid, provides at the same time an undisturbed atmosphere more suited to the development of their own tender frames. We need scarcely add, that the doctor the next morning finds the wonted cheerful smile restored, and though recovery may be beyond the skill, as it is beyond the ken, of man, he at least has the satisfaction of knowing that he has lightened a heart in affliction, and gained the gratitude of a humble spirit, in restoring, without the poison, a pleasure that was lost.
For more minute particulars of the management of these chamber-gardens, we must refer our readers to page xviii. of Mr. Newman's Introduction, where also they will find described the ingenious experi- ments of Mr. Ward, of Wellclose Square, of the same kind, but on a much larger scale ; and if delicate health restricts any friend of theirs to the confine- ment of a close apartment, we recommend to them the considerate kindness of our good physician, and to "go and do likewise."
CURIOSITIES OF GARDENING. 41
Gardening, as well as Literature, has its " curi- osities," and a volume might be filled with them. How wonderful, for instance, the sensitive plant which shrinks from the hand of man, — the ice-plant that almost cools one by looking at it, — the pitcher- plant with its welcome draught, — the hair-trigger of the stylidium, — and, most singular of all, the car- nivorous " Venus' fly-trap " (Dioncea muscipula) —
" Only think of a vegetable being carnivorous ! " —
which is said to bait its prickles with something which attracts the flies, upon whom it then closes, and whose decay is supposed to afford food for the plant. Disease is turned into beauty in the common and crested moss-rose, and a lusus natures reproduced in the hen-and-chicken daisy. There are phos- phorescent plants, the fire-flies and glow-worms of the vegetable kingdom : there are the microscopic lichens and mosses ; and there is the Kafflesia Arnoldi, each of whose petals is a foot long, its nectary a foot in diameter, and deep enough to contain three gal- lons, and weighing fifteen pounds ! What mimickry is there in the orchisses, and the hare's-foot fern, and the Tartarian lamb (Polypodium Baronyetz *) !
* So, we believe, rightly spelt ; though otherwise by Dr. Darwin, whose well-balanced and once-fashionable lines are now so forgotten, that we think our readers will not be sorry to be reminded of their pompous existence : —
" Cradled in snow and fann'd by arctic air, Shines, gentle BAROMETZ ! thy golden hair ; Rooted in earth each cloven hoof descends, And round and round her flexile neck she bends ;
Crops
42 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
What shall we say to Gerarde's Barnacle-trees, " whereon do grow certaine shells of a white colour tending to russet, wherein are contained little living creatures : which shells in time of maturity do open, and out of them grow those little living things, which falling into the water do become fowles, which we call Barnacles ?" What monsters (such at least they are called by botanists) lias art produced in doubling flowers, in dwarfing, and hybridizing; — " painting the lily," — for there are pink (!) lilies of the valley, and pink violets, and yellow roses, and blue hydrangeas ; and many are now busy in seeking that " philosopher's stone of gardening," the blue dahlia — a useless search, if it be true that there is no instance of a yellow and a blue variety in the same species. Foreigners turn to good account this foolish rage of ours for everything novel and mon- strous and unnatural, more worthy of Japan and China than of England, by imposing upon the credulous seeds and cuttings of yellow moss-roses, and scarlet laburnums, and fragrant pasonies, and such like*
Strange things too have been attempted in garden ornaments. We have spoken of water-works, like the copper-tree at Chatsworth, to drench the unwary ; and the Chinese have, in the middle of their lawns, ponds covered with some water-weed that looks like
Crops the grey coral moss, and hoary thyme> Or laps with rosy tongue the melting rime ; Eyes with mute tenderness her distant dam, Or seems to bleat, a Vegetable Lamb ! "
JBot. Gard., ii. 283.
FLOATING GARDENS. 43
grass, so that a stranger is plunged in over head and ears while he thinks he is setting his foot upon the turf. In the ducal gardens at Saxe-Gotha is a ruined castle, which was built complete, and then ruined expres by a few sharp rounds of artillery ! Stanislaus, in the grounds of Lazienki, had a broad walk flanked by pedestals upon which living figures, dressed or undressed " after the manner of the antients," were placed on great occasions. The floating gardens, or Chinampas, of Mexico, are mentioned both by Clavigero and Humboldt. They are formed on wicker-work, and when a proprietor wishes for a little change, or to rid himself of a troublesome neighbour, he has only to set his paddles at work, or lug out his towing-rope, and betake himself to some more agreeable part of the lake. We wonder that the barbaric magnificence which piled up mimic pyramids, and Chinese watch-towers, and mock Stonehenges, never bethought itself of imitating these poetical Chinampas. It was one of Napoleon's bubble* schemes to cover in the gardens of the Tuileries with glass — those gardens which were turned into potato-ground during the Ee volution, though the agent funnily complains that the Direc- tory never paid him for the sets ! One of the most successful pieces of magnificent gardening is the new conservatory at Chatsworth, with a carriage-drive through the centre, infinitely more perfect, though we suppose not so extensive as the covered winter* garden at Potemkin's palace of Taurida, near St.
* [A bubble, however, since crystallized in Hyde Park, 1851.]
44 THE FLOWER (?ARDEN.
Petersburgli, which is described as a semicircular conservatory attached to the hall of the palace, wherein " the walks wander amidst flowery hedges, and fruit-bearing shrubs, winding over little hills," —in fact a complete garden, artificially heated, and adorned with the usual embellishments of busts and vases. When this mighty man in his travels halted, if only for a day, his travelling pavilion was erected, and surrounded by a garden a VAnglaise ! " com- posed of trees and shrubs, and divided ly gravel walks, and ornamented with seats and statues, all carried for ivard with the cavalcade /" We ought in fairness to our readers to add that Sir John Carr, notorious by another less honourable prsenomen, is the authority for this ; though, indeed, his statement is authenticated by Mr. Loudon (Encyc. Grard. sect. 842). We have heard of the effect of length being given to an avenue by planting the more dis- tant trees nearer and nearer together ; but among gardening crochets we have never yet seen a children's garden as we think it might be made — beds, seats, arbours, moss-house, all in miniature, with dwarf shrubs and fairy roses, and other flowers of only the smallest kind ; or it might be laid out on turf, to suit the intellectual spirit of the age, like a map of the two hemispheres.
It is time that we pass to that portion of our sub- ject which is generally considered under the peculiar patronage of the ladies. Evelyn, a name never to be mentioned by gardeners without reverence, says somewhere, in describing an English place which he
GARDENING FOR LADIES. 45
had visited, " My lady skilled in the flowery part ; my lord in the diligence of planting ;" and this is a division of country labour which almost universal consent and practice have sanctioned. The gardens at Wimbledon House and Baling Park (we dare not trust ourselves to take a wider view, or we know not where to stop) are alone enough to show what the knowledge and taste of our countrywomen can achieve in their own department; and with the assistance of Mrs. Loudon, the fair possessors of the smallest plot of garden-ground may now emulate on an humbler scale these splendid examples.
In her * Gardening for Ladies,' Mrs. Loudon, indeed, initiates them far beyond the mere culture of flowers, and those lighter labours which have usually been assigned to the amateur. She enters into practical details in real good earnest, gives directions to her lady-gardeners to dig and manure their own parterres — on this latter subject there is no mincing of the matter — she calls a spade a spade. Perhaps she satisfies herself that, if not a feminine, this has at least been a royal pastime, and so throws in the weight of King Laertes in Homer* to balance the scale. But really, what with our nitrate of soda, bone-dust, gypsum, guano, all our new patent pocket-
* According to Cicero, De Sen., c. 15. " Homerus Laertem leni- entem desiderium, quod capiebat e filio, colentem agrum, et eum ster- corantem facit." " Memoriae lapsu," say the critics ; the passage in Odys., w. 226, not bearing out this meaning. But in line 241 of the same book, the aia(^€\dxaiv€ may imply the renewal as well as the loosening of the soil. We should venture to translate it by the word " mulching."
46 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
manures, portable, compressed, crystalline, liquid, desiccated, disinfected, and the rest of them, we are by no means sure that this most necessary but rather disagreeable portion of horticulture may not soon be performed by the same delicate nerves that have hitherto fainted at the mention of it.
Ten years ago, when our authoress married Mr. Loudon, " it was impossible," she says, " to imagine any person more completely ignorant of everything relating to plants and gardening " than herself. She has been certainly an apt scholar, and no expert reviewer can doubt there is some truth in her remark, that her very recent ignorance makes her a better instructor of beginners, from the recollection of her own wants in a similar situation. One wrinkle of hers we recommend strongly to our fair readers, the gardening gauntlet,* described and pictured in page 10. We have seen this in use, and can assure them that it is far from an inelegant, and certainly a most comfortable assistant in all the operations of the gar- den. Let us also add a contrivance of our own, a close- woven wicker-basket, on two very low wheels, similar to those used at the Euston Square and most railway stations for moving luggage, only on a smaller scale : it is much more useful than a wheelbarrow for carrying away cuttings, dead leaves, and rubbish of all kinds.
* Here, again, our old friend Laertes meets us. Truly there is nothing new under the sun. He had his gardening gloves before " Miss Perry of Stroud," celebrated by Mrs. Loudon as the inventor of them : —
eVt xepcrl, &O.TUV weKa.— Od., u. 229.
WATERING. 47
There are in this volume many excellent general directions for the ordinary garden labours, some of which we shall notice, interweaving them with further observations of our own.
Watering is the mainstay of horticulture in hot climates. When King Solomon, in the vanity of his mind, made him " gardens and orchards," he made him also " pools of water to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees ;" and the pro- phets frequently compare the spiritual prosperity of the soul to " a watered garden." It is with us also a most necessary operation, but very little under- stood. Most young gardeners conceive that the water for their plants cannot be too fresh and cold ; and many a pail of water that has stood in the sun is thrown away in order to bring one " fresh from the ambrosial fount." A greater mistake could not be made. Rain-water is best of all ; and dirty and stagnant water, and of a high temperature — anything is better than cold spring- water. Mrs. Loudon re- commends pump-water to be exposed in open tubs before it is used, and to be stirred about to impreg- nate it with air; perhaps the addition of liquid manure or any other extraneous matter would be useful. Those who have found how little service their continual watering has done to their plants in a dry summer would do well to attend to these simple rules.
Lawns and gravel-walks, the pride of English gardens, can hardly have too much care bestowed upon them. Oftentimes more of the beauty of a
48 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
garden depends on the neatness with which these are kept than even on the flowers themselves. Great attention should be paid to the kinds of grass-seeds which are sown for new lawns. The horticultural seedsmen have selections made for this purpose. We must refer our readers to Mrs. London's 9th chapter ; but let them be sure not to omit the sweet-scented spring-grass (Anthoxanthum odoratum) , which gives its delicious fragrance to new-made hay. Lime- water will get rid of the worms when they infest the lawn in great quantities ; but perhaps it is as well not to destroy them altogether. Most gardeners strive to eradicate the moss from their grass : it seems to us that it should rather be encouraged : it renders the lawn much more soft to the foot, prevents its being dried up in hot weather, and saves much labour in mowing. The most perfect kind of lawn is perhaps that which consists of only one kind of grass ; but for the generality a mossy surface would be far better than the mangy, bare aspect we so often see. The grass should never be mown without having also its edges trimmed. We have seen in some places a small slope of grass filling up the right angle usually left between the turf and gravel, and ,we think it an improvement.
The smoothness and verdure of our lawns is the first thing in our gardens that catches the eye of a foreigner ; the next is the fineness and firmness of our gravel-walks. The foundation of them should always be thoroughly drained. Weeds may be de- stroyed by salt ; but it must be used cautiously.
LAWNS — WALKS — EDGINGS. 49
No walk should be less than seven feet broad. For terraces a common rule given is, that they should be twice the breadth that the house is high. Though of course it is enough for a " lover's walk " — with- out which no country place is perfect — to accommo- date a duad, yet, be it in what part of the grounds it may, every path should be broad enough to admit three persons walking abreast.
Who cannot call to mind many an awkward feel- ing and position where want of breadth in a garden- walk or wood-path has called into play some unsocial precedence or forced into notice some sly predilec- tion? And who likes to be the unfortunate lag- behind — the last in a wood ?
The edging of borders is always a difficult affair to manage well. Box, the commonest, and perhaps the best, is apt to harbour slugs, and get shabby, unless closely attended to. The gentianella, where it nourishes well, is a beautiful edge-flower. Thrift, of which there is a new and handsome variety, was once (like its namesake) much more in vogue than it is now, and deserves to be restored. We have seen very pretty edgings made of dwarf oaks clipped ; nothing could look neater ; but it seemed like rob- bing the forest. Worst of all are large rugged flints, used commonly where they abound, and in small area-gardens. In a symmetrical garden, and where they harmonise with the house, strips of stone-work might be introduced ; and we think that a tile might be designed of better shape and colour than any we have yet seen.
50 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
On the minor decorations of the garden, such as rock- work, moss-houses, and rustic seats, &c., Mrs. Loudon gives some very good hints, though we should be sorry to set up on our lawn the specimen baskets which embellish pp. 357 and 358 ; but, in truth, these things, contrary to the common rule, usually look better in reality than on paper. Where beds of irregular wavy lines are required to be made we have found nothing better than a good thick rope, which, thrown at random on the ground, will, with a little adjustment, give a bold and natural out- line that it would be difficult to work out otherwise in tenfold the time.
Mrs. Loudon's ' Ladies' Companion to the Flower Garden,' is in alphabetical arrangement, and exclu- sively devoted to flowers. In all our references to this book for practical purposes and for the present paper, we have scarcely once been disappointed. Though chiefly a book of reference, it is written in so easy a style and so perfectly free from pedantry, that, open it at what page we may, there is some- thing to instruct, interest, and amuse. The practi- cal directions are necessarily very compressed, but nothing of importance seems omitted. The greatest " Ignorama " * in flowers could not have this volume on her table long without having every doubt and difficulty removed. We know of no book of the kind so likely to spread a knowledge of, and taste
* So, appropriately enough, signs herself a fair correspondent of one of our gardening Journals. We think this quite equal to Mr. Hume's "Omuibt."
MARCH OF GARDENING. 51
for, flower-gardening as this. With the addition of the botanical volume of Dr. Lindley, Mr. Pax ton, or Mrs. Loudon, the beginner's gardening library would be complete. He would afterwards like to add the Encyclopaedias of Plants and Gardening ; the first of which is a typographical as well as scientific wonder, the second a perfect treasure-house of information on every subject connected with horticulture.
The rapid progress made in horticultural studies we have already alluded to in the immense increase of works devoted to these subjects, especially of those addressed to ladies and treating immediately of flowers. And it is this particular turn which gar- dening taste at the present moment is taking. We first had the Herbalist with his simples — " tempera- ture " of every plant given, hot or cold in the second or the third degree — and a " table of virtues " for both body and mind — " against the falling-sickness " — " to glue together greene wounds " — " to comfort the heart, to drive away care, and increase the joy of the mind," and the like. Then came the Kitchen- gardener, with his sallet-herbs and fruit-trees — then the Botanist with his orders and classes — then the Florist with his choice bulbs and thousand and one varieties : meanwhile sprang up the critical school of essayists, which produced the Landscape-gardener ; 1 the modern march of intellect has added the Vege- table Physiologist ; and, latest of all, the Agricul- tural Chemist. All these seem at the present moment to have centred their exertions in a single point, and to be giving in each his contribution to
52 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
make up the perfection of the Flower-gardener. A very different spirit is now abroad from that when Sir W. Temple wrote " I will not enter upon any account of flowers, having only pleased myself with seeing or smelling them, and not troubled myself with the care, which is more the lady's part than the man's, but the success is wholly with the gardener." Now not only have we beat the old herbalists, kitchen-gardeners, and botanists on their own ground — for " the leaf," " the root," and " the weed," tea — potatoes — tobacco* — were either un- known or hardly noticed by the earlier writers on these very subjects — but governments, and com- panies, and societies, vie with men of science, and commerce, and wealth, in gladdening our British gardens with a new flower. Without dwelling on the dahlia, brought into fashion by Lady Holland in 1804, and the pansies first patronised and hybridized by Lady Mary Monk in 1812, what treasures have the last few years added to our gardens in the splendid colours of the petunias, calceolarias, lobelias, phloxes, tropoeolums, and verbenas — the azure cle- matis— the blue salvia — the fulgent fuchsia ! What gorgeous masses of geraniums, — the " Orange-bo\en "
* Parkinson, in 1629, says only of tobacco — " With us it is cherished as well for the medicinal qualities as for the beauty of its flowers;" not a word of smoking. Gerarde, in 1633, though he knows " the dry leaves are us^d to be taken in a pipe, set on fire, and suckt into the stomache, and thrust forth againe at the nosthrils," yet "commends the syrup, above this fume or smoky medicine." Of the potato, he mentions its being " a meat for pleasure " as secondary to its " temperature and vertues ;" and that its " too frequent use causeth the leprosie." Neither of them, of course, mentions "tea."
CHISWICK SHOWS. 53
and " Coronation " and " Priory Queen " for instance — and what rich and endless bouquets of roses — for there are more than 2000 varieties of " the flower " in cultivation — did the last horticultural fete at Chiswick produce !
These exhibitions of the London Horticultural Society have done wonders in improving public taste and exciting the emulation of nurserymen. It is something, even if the prize is missed, to know that your flower will be gazed at by five or six thousand critical admirers. But they have done more than this : they have brought together, on one common scene of enjoyment, an orderly and happy mass, from the labourer of the soil to the queen upon the throne. We could only have wished that royalty had been pleased to have paid a public as well as private visit to the gardens. Her Majesty would have gratified the loyalest and best-conducted portion of her subjects, and would have seen, on the only occasion, perhaps, when she could have done so without annoyance, a sight, as beautiful even as the flowers — the cheerful faces of thousands of well- dressed and happy-looking people of every degree, making the most innocent and enjoyable of holidays out of such simple elements as Music and Flowers. The " Derby day" is certainly a glorious display of Old England, from the proprietor of the aristocratic drag to the hirer of the Whitechapel cart; but the line of distinction, both on the road and the course, is too strongly marked between the drinker of champagne and of bottled stout, and it is rather
54 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
the jostling than the amalgamation of ranks that is seen here. If we wished to show an " intelligent foreigner" what e very-day England really is — what we mean by the middle classes — what by the wealth, the power, the beauty of the gentry of England — what by the courtesy and real unaffectedness of our nobility — we would take him on a horticultural fete- day to see the string of well-ordered carriages and well-filled omnibuses, the fly, the hackney, and the glass-coach taking up their position with the britzcha, the barouche, and the landau, in one unbroken line from Hyde Park Corner to Turnham Green — bid him look at the good-humoured faces of those who filled them, and say whether any other country in the world could, or ever would, turn out a like popu- lation. Sir Kobert Peel need not fear the return to be made to his property-tax, if he will cast his eye on the Windsor road about three o'clock on the first fine Saturday of May or June. Last year more than 22,000 persons visited these exhibitions ; and from the way in which they have commenced this year, there is no reason to apprehend any falling off of numbers. We rejoice in this ; and trust that the same good arrangements will be continued, that the interest may be kept up in the only meeting where our artificial system tolerates the assemblage of every rank and class upon an equal footing.
The formal style which we have already advo- cated for the private garden seems even much more adapted to the public one ; and that there are many neglected features in the Old English style which
OLD ENGLISH STYLE. 55
might with peculiar propriety be restored in any new grounds laid out for public use — not, as has been done in some tea-gardens on the Croydon Rail- road, cutting up the picturesque wildness of the beautiful Penge Wood by hideous right-angled walks and other horrors too frightful to name — but where no natural scenery already exists, a place of pro- menade and recreation may be much more expe- ditiously, and, we think, more appropriately formed, in the Continental and Old English style, by long avenues, terraces, mounds, fountains, statues, monu- ments, prospect - towers, labyrinths, and bowling- greens, than by any attempt of a " picturesque " or "natural" character.
We have before us Lord Bacon's sketch for his "prince-like" garden, and Sir William Temple's description of his " perfect " one ; but though we would recommend them, the first especially, to the student of ancient gardens, and though Dr. Donne considered the second " the sweetest place " he had ever seen, yet neither of them is so well suited to our present purpose of assisting the formation of garden-making in the^ present age, as the descrip- tion given in fanciful style in ' The Poetry of Gardening.' *
If we rightly understand the plan here described, It is intended to combine the chief excellences of
* [In place of the extract given in the Quarterly, we have appended the whole Essay on ' The Poetry of Gardening,' which appeared originally in the Carthusian, as being generally difficult of access, and appropriate on the whole to the subjects of this volume. The passage immediately referred to above is from p. 100 to 106.]
56 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
the artificial and natural styles ; keeping the decora- tions immediately about the house formal, and so passing on by gradual transitions to the wildest scenes of nature.
The leading features then in such a garden would be an architectural terrace and flight of steps in con- nection with the house — lower terraces of grass-slopes and flower-beds succeeding — these branching off on one side towards the kitchen department, through an old English garden, of which a bowling-green would form a part, and where florists' flowers might be sheltered by the trim hedges — on the other towards an undulating lawn bounded by flowering shrubs and the larger herbaceous plants — with one corner for the American garden, beyond which would lie the natural copsewood and forest-ground of the place: of course the aspect and situation of the house, and the character of the neighbouring ground and country, would modify these or any general rules which might be laid down for the formation of a garden ; but we think some advantage might, in every case, be taken from these hints.
In a place of any pretension, a good clear lawn where children of younger or older growth may romp about, without fear of damaging shrubs or plants, is indispensable.
Single shrubs and flowers, or groups of them, on the verge of this lawn, springing up directly from the turf, and dotted in front of shrubberies that bound it, are preferable to those growing with a dis- tinctly marked border. The common peonies, and
PERFECT GARDEN. 57
the Chinese variety — the tree-peony (P. moutan.), are excellent for this purpose ; but there is nothing to surpass the old-fashioned hollyhock. This, as has been remarked, is the only landscape flower we possess — the only one, that is, whose forms and colours tell in the distance ; and so picturesque is it, that perhaps no artist ever attempted to draw a garden without introducing it, whether it were really there or not. "By far the finest effect (says the essay we have already referred to) that combined art and nature ever produced in gardening were those fine masses of many-coloured hollyhocks clustered round a weather-tinted vase ; such as Sir Joshua delighted to place in the wings of his pictures. And what more magnificent than a long avenue of these floral giants, the double and the single — not too straightly tied — backed by a dark thick hedge of old-fashioned yew ?" * Such an avenue — without " the dark thick hedge," which would certainly have been an improvement — we remember to have seen, in the fulness of its autumn splendour, in the garden at Granton, near Edinburgh, the marine villa of a deep lawyer — and another may have been in- spected by many of our readers at Bromley Hill. Here the hollyhocks " broke the horizon with their obelisks of colour ;" and the foreground was a mass of dahlias, American marigolds, mallows, asters, and mignionette. It was the most gorgeous mass of
* We do not often indulge in a prophecy, but we will venture to stake our gardening credit that, within five years' time, the hollyhock will again be restored to favour, become a florist's flower, and carry off horticultural prizes. [This prophecy has been more than fulfilled, 1852.]
58 THE FLOWER GARDEN".
colouring we ever beheld ; but was only one of the many beautiful effects produced on this spot by the taste of the late Lady Farnborough. For a modern garden, of limited size, this was the most complete we ever visited, the situation allowing greater variety than could well be conceived within so small a com- pass. A conservatory connected with the house led to a summer-room : this looked on a small Italian garden — the highest point of the grounds, and afford- ing a dim view of the dome of St. Paul's in the distance ; and thence you descended, by steep grassy banks and steps of rock and root-work, from garden to garden, each having some peculiar feature of its own, till you came to the most perfect little Ruysdael rivulet, and such crystal springs, in all their natural wildness, that it seemed, when you saw them, you had never known what pure cold native fountains were before. Any common taste would have be- dizened these springs with cockle-shells and crockery, and what not ; but there they lay among the broad leaves of the water-lily and the burdock, glittering like huge liquid diamonds cast in a mould of nature's own making, and in their simplicity and pureness offering a striking contrast to the trim gardens and the dusky distant city you had just left above.*
* There was no occasion in this place for the exclamation of the Roman satirist on a similar scene which had been marred by art — Quanto praestantius esset
Numen aquae, viridi si margine clauderet undas Herba, nee insenuum violarent marmora tophum."
Juv. iii. 19.
And which shows, by the way, that there were some Romans, at least, who could appreciate the beauties of natural scenery.
BROMLEY HILL — GARDEN-SITE. 59
Another source of great beauty in these gardens was the evident care bestowed on the growth and position of the flowers. Every plant seemed to be just in its right place, both for its flourishing and its effect. There was a very great abundance and variety of the tenderer kinds that required pro- tection in winter; but we believe they were, for the most part, kept in cold pits, very little forcing being used ; and there were not more than six or eight gardeners and labourers at any time employed. We still have before our eyes the splendid masses of the common scarlet geranium, and a smaller bed of the variegated-leafed variety, edged with a border of the ivy -leafed kind ; nor ought we to forget the effect of a large low ring of ivy on the lawn, which looked like a gigantic chaplet carelessly thrown there by some Titan hand.
A garden should always lie sloping to the south, and if possible to the south of the house.* In this case the chief entrance to the house should be, in an ordinarily sheltered situation, on the east or north ; for, common as the fault is, nothing so entirely spoils a garden as to have it placed in front of the public approach. Views, it should be remembered, are always clearest in the opposite direction to the sun. Thus the north is most uninterruptedly clear through-
* To show how difficult it is to lay down any general rule, uncon- troverted, here is one from Macintosh's * Practical Gardener,' one of the hest practical works on horticulture we possess. " In all cases, unless in small villas or cottage residences, the flower-garden should be entirely concealed from the windows of the house, and be placed, if circumstances will admit of it, in the shrubbery."
60 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
out the day ; the west in the morning ; the east in the afternoon. Speaking with a view only to garden- ing effect, trees, which are generally much too near the dwelling for health, and beauty, and everything else, should be kept at a distance from the house, except on the east side. On the south and west they keep off the sun, of which we can never have too much in England ; and on the north they render the place damp and gloomy ; whereas, on that side they should be kept so far from the windows as to back and shelter a bright bank of shrubs and flowers, planted far enough from the shadow cast by the house to catch the sun upon them during the greater part of the year and day. The prospect towards the north would then be as cheerful as any other.
It is astonishing how people continue to plant spruce and Scotch firs, and larches, and other incon- gruous forest-trees, so close that they chafe the very house with their branches, when there are at hand such beautiful trees as the Lebanon and Deodara cedars ; or, for smaller, or more formal, or spiral shrubs, the red cedar, the Cyprus, the arbor-vitas, the holly, the yew, and —most graceful of all, either as a tree or shrub, or rather uniting the properties of both, and which only requires shelter to make it flourish — the hemlock spruce.
As a low shrubby plant on the lawn, nothing can exceed the glossy, dark, indented leaves and bright yellow spikes of the new evergreen berberries (Ber- beris* aquifolium and B. repent), with their many
* Now changed to Mahonia.
BERBER1S — DEODARA. 61
hybrid varieties. They are becoming daily more popular, not only from their beauty, but as affording perhaps the best underwood covert for game yet discovered. The experiments made in the woods of Sudbury and elsewhere have completely succeeded ; the plant being evergreen, very hardy, of easy growth, standing the tree-drip, and affording in its berry an excellent food for pheasants. Our nursery- men are already anticipating the demand, and we have no doubt that a few years' time will see this the main undergrowth of our game-preserves. The notice we took a few years ago (in an Article on the Arboretum Britannicum) * of the Deodara pine — now classed among the cedars — has — unless the dealers flatter us — given a great impetus to the cultivation of this valuable tree. Its timber qualities as a British-grown tree have not of course been yet tested ; but as an ornamental one — in which cha-
* Q. R., vol. Ixii. p. 359. The Chili pine (Araucaria imbricata) is now treading upon the heels of the Deodara cedar as an ornamental garden-tree ; but though announced as " the largest tree in the world,'' it will ever want the elegance of the latter. Even yet another monster is threatening us under the name of Pawlonia imperials: it was intro- duced into France from Japan by Dr. Siebold, and promises to be one of the most imposing plants in our gardens. We saw some young plants this spring in Mr. Bollison's nursery, which were obtained from the Royal Gardener at Versailles. The leaves of a specimen in the Jardin des Plantes are said to measure from 18 to 24 inches across. While speaking of trees, we would say one word on the acacia Cobbett's famous locust-tree (Robinia pseudoacacid), now more than necessarily depreciated. We are fully aware of its defects as a timber- tree from the brittleness and splitting of its branches, and slowness in making bulk ; but once get a bole large enough to cut a post out of it, and ask your carpenter whether it will not last as long as the iron fixed into it. It is more to our present purpose to say that it is by far the best tree to be used for ornamental rustic-work, as its bark is as tough as its timber, and never peels off.
62 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
racter only we can refer to it here — it has more than surpassed the highest expectations entertained re- specting it. The nurserymen cannot propagate it fast enough by grafts and layers, and the abundance of seed which the East India Company has so libe- rally distributed.
The olitory, or herb-garden, is a part of our horti- culture now comparatively neglected ; and yet once the culture and culling of simples was as much a part of female education as the preserving and tying down of " rasps and apricocks." There was not a Lady Bountiful in the kingdom but made her dill- tea and diet-drink from herbs of her own planting ; and there is a neatness and prettiness about our thyme, and sage, and mint, and marjoram, that might yet, we think, transfer them from the pa- tronage of the blue serge to that of the white muslin apron. Lavender, and rosemary, and rue, the feathery fennel, and the bright-blue borage, are all pretty bushes in their way, and might have their due place assigned them by the hand of beauty and taste. A strip for a little herbary, halfway between the flower and vegetable garden, would form a very appropriate transition stratum, and might be the means, by being more under the eye of the mistress, of recovering to our soups and salads some of the comparatively neg- lected herbs of tarragon, and French sorrel, and purslane, and chervil, and dill, and clary, and others whose place is now nowhere to be found but in the meres of the old herbalists. This little plot should
JL O -L
be laid out, of course, in a simple geometric pattern ;
" OLITORY-— MAZE — BOWLING-GREEN. 63
and, having tried the experiment, we can boldly pronounce on its success. We recommend the idea to the consideration of our lady-gardeners.
We can recall so much amusement in early years from the maze at Hampton Court, that we could heartily wish to see a few more such planted. Daines Barrington mentions a plan for one in Switzer (Iconographia, 1718) with twenty stops : that at Hampton has but four. A fanciful summer- house perched at the top of a high mound, with narrow winding paths leading to it, was another favourite ornament of old British gardens. Traces of many such mounds still exist ; but the crowning- buildings are, alas! no more. We must own our predilection for them, if it were only that the gilded pinnacle seemed to prefigure to the young idea " Fame's proud temple shining from afar " (it is always so drawn in frontispieces) ; while the hard climbing was a palpable type of the ambition of after years.
The snug smooth bowling-green is another desi- deratum we would have restored; and gardeners ought to know that the clipped yew hedges which should accompany it are the best possible protection for their flowers ; and that there is nothing flowers need so much as shelter, the nursery-grounds, where almost alone these hedges are now retained, will testify. Where they already exist, even in a situation where shelter is not required, and where yet a good view is shut out, we should prefer cutting windows or niches in the solid hedge to removing it
64 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
altogether. In conjunction with these, what can be handsomer than the iron tracery-work which came into fashion with the Dutch style, and of which Hampton Court affords so splendid an example? Good screens of this work, which on their first intro- duction were called clair-voyees, may be seen at Oxford in Trinity and New College Gardens. Some years ago we heard of a proposition to remove the latter : the better taste of the present day will not, we think, renew the scheme. Though neither of these are in the rich flamboyant style which is some- times seen, there is still character enough about them to assure us that, were they destroyed, nothing so good would be put up in their place. Oxford has already lost too many of its characteristic alleys and parterres. The last sweep was at the Botanic Gar- den, where, however, the improvements recently introduced by the zeal and liberality of the present Professor must excuse it. If any college-garden is again to be reformed, we hope that the fellows will have courage enough to lay it out in a style which is at once classical and monastic ; and set Pliny's example against Walpole's sneer, that "in an age when architecture displayed all its grandeur, all its purity, and all its taste ; when arose Vespasian's amphitheatre, the temple of Peace, Trajan's forum, Domitian's baths, and Adrian's villa, the ruins and vestiges of which still excite our astonishment and curiosity — a Roman consul, a polished emperor's friend, and a man of elegant literature and taste, delighted in what the mob now scarce admire in a
OXFORD GARDENS — THE FORMAL STYLE. 65
college-garden." He little thought how soon sturdy Oxford would follow in the fashion of the day, and blunt the point of his period. Still more astonished would he have been to have had his natural style traced to no less a founder than Nero, and even the names of the Bridgeman and Brown of the day handed down for his edification.*
The same train of thought is followed out in ' The Poetry of Gardening/ p. 86.
The good taste of the proprietors of Hardwick and Levens still retains these gardens as nearly as pos- sible in their original state ; but places like these are yearly becoming more curious from their rarity. We have heard of one noble but eccentric lord, the Elgin of the topiary art, who is buying up all the yew-peacocks in the country to form an avenue in his domain at Elvaston. Meanwhile the lilacs of Nonsuch, and the orange-trees of Beddington, are no more. The fish-pools of Wanstead are dry ; the terraces of Moor-park are levelled. Even that " im- pregnable hedge of holly " — the pride of Evelyn — than which "a more glorious and refreshing object" did not exist under heaven — " one hundred and sixty foot in length, seven foot high, and five in
* Tacitus, in the Sixth Book of his ' Annals,' gives us this inform- ation : — <; Ceterum Nero usus est patriae ruinis, extruxitque domum, in qua haud perinde gemmae et aurum miraculo essent, solita pridem et luxu vulgata, quam arva et stagna et in modum solitudinum hinc syivse, inde aperta spatia et prospectus ; magistris et machinatoribus Severo et Celere, quibus ingenium et audacia erat, etiam quse natura denegavisset per artem tentare, et viribus principis illudere." We since learn from ' Loudon's Encyclopaedia,' sec. 1145, that this passage was suggested by Forsyth to Walpole, who promised to insert it in the second edition of his ' Essay,' but failed to do so.
F
66 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
diameter" — wliicli lie could show in liis "poor gardens at any time of the year, glitt'ring with its arm'd and vernish'd leaves — the taller standards, at orderly distances, blushing with their natural corall" — that mocked at " the rudest assaults of the weather, the beasts, or hedge-breaker" — even this is vanished without a solitary sucker to show where it once stood. Proof it long was against the wind and " weather," nay, against time itself, but not against the autocratic pleasure of a barbarian Czar. The " beast " and the " hedge-breaker " were united in the person of Peter the Great, whose great plea- sure, when studying at Deptford, was to be driven in a wheelbarrow, or drive one himself, through this very hedge, which its planter deemed impregnable ! If he had ever heard, which he probably had not, of Evelyn's boast, he might have thus loved to illus- trate the triumph of despotic will and brute force over the most amiable and simple affections ; but at any rate the history of this hedge affords a curious instance not only of the change of gardening taste, but of the mutability and strangeness of all earthly things.
No associations are stronger than those connected with a garden. It is the first pride of an emigrant settled on some distant shore to have a little garden as like as he can make it to the one he left at home. A pot of violets or mignionette is one of the highest luxuries to an Anglo-Indian. In the bold and pic- turesque scenery of Batavia, the Dutch can, from feeling, no more dispense with their little moats
LOVERS OF GARDENS. 67
round their houses than they could, from necessity, in the flat swamps of their native land. Sir John Hobhouse discovered an Englishman's residence on the shore of the Hellespont by the character of his shrubs and flowers. Louis XVIII. on his restoration to France made in the park of Versailles the fac- simile of the garden at Hartwell ; and there was no more amiable trait in the life of that accomplished prince. Napoleon used to say that he should know his father's garden in Corsica blindfold by the smell of the earth ; and the hanging gardens of Babylon are said to have been raised by the Median queen of Nebuchadnezzar on the flat and naked plains of her adopted country, to remind her of the hills and woods of her childhood.
Why should we speak of the plane-trees of Plato — Shakspere's mulberry-tree — Pope's willow — By- ron's elm ? Why describe Cicero at his Tusculum — Evelyn at Wooton — Pitt at Holcot — Walpole at Houghton — Grenville at Dropmore ? Why dwell on Bacon's " little tufts of thyme," or Conde's pinks, or Fox's geraniums ? There is a spirit in the garden as well as in the wood, and " the lilies of the field " supply food for the imagination as well as materials for sermons. " Talke of perfect happiness or pleasure," says old Gerarde to the " courteous and well- willing reader," from his " house in Holborn, within the suburbs of London " — " and what place was so fit for that as the garden-place wherein Adam was set to be the herbalist ? Whither did the poets hunt for their sincere delights but into the gardens of Alcinous, of
F2
68 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
Adonis, and the orchards of the Hesperides ? Where did they dream that heaven should be but in the pleasant garden of Elysium ? Whither doe all men walke for their honest recreation but thither where the earth hath most beneficially painted her face with flourishing colours ? And what season of the yeare more longed for than the spring, whose gentle breath enticeth forth the kindly sweets, and makes them yield their fragrant smells ?"
And what country, we may add, so suited, and climate so attempered, to yield the full enjoyment of the pleasures and blessings of a garden, as our own? Everybody knows the remark of Charles II. , first promulgated by Sir W. Temple, "that there were more days in the year in which one could enjoy oneself in the open air in England than in any other portion of the known world." This, which contains so complete an answer to the weather-grumblers of our island, bears also along with it a most encourag- ing truth to those " who love to live in gardens." There is no country that offers the like advantages to horticulture. Perhaps there is not one plant in the wide world wholly incapable of being cultivated in England. The mosses and lichens dragged from under the snows of Iceland, and the tenderest creep- ers of the tropical jungles, are alike subject to the art of the British gardener. Artificial heat and cold, by the due application of steam and manure, sun and shade, hot and cold water, and even ice — mattings, flues in every variety of pit, frame, con- servative wall, conservatory, greenhouse, hothouse,
ENGLISH CLIMATE. 69
and stove, seem to have realised every degree of temperature from Kamskatka to Sincapore. But apart from artificial means, the natural mildness of our sky is most favourable to plants brought from countries of either extreme of temperature ; and, as their habits are better known and attended to, not a year passes without acclimatising many heretofore deemed too tender for the open air. Gardeners are reasonably cautious in not exposing at once a newly- introduced exotic ; and thus we know that when Parkinson wrote, in 1629, the larch, and the laurel — then called bay-cherry — were still protected in winter. We are now daily adding to the list of our hardy plants ; hydrangeas, the tree-peony, fuchsias, salvias, altromaerias, and Cape-bulbs, are now found, with little or no protection, to stand our mid- England winters.
Then we alone have in perfection the three main elements of gardening, flowers apart, in our lawns, our gravel, and our evergreens. It is the greatest stretch of foreign luxury to emulate these. The lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regu- larly irrigated to keep up even the semblance of English verdure ; and at the gardens of Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been sup- plied from the Kensington gravel-pits. It is not probably generally known that among our exporta- tions are every year a large quantity of evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade. This may seem the more
70 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
remarkable to those who fancy that, from the supe- riority of foreign climates, any English tree would bear a continental winter ; but the bare appearance of the French gardens, mostly composed as they are of deciduous trees, would soon convince them of the contrary. It is not the severity or length of our December nights that generally destroys our more tender exotic plants, but it is the late frosts of April and May, — those "nipping frosts," which, coming on after the plant has enjoyed warmth enough to set the sap in action, freeze its life-blood to the heart's core, and cause it to wither and die. The late winter of 1837-8 proved this fact distinctly, which had hardly been sufficiently remarked before. That year, which cut down even our cypresses and china- roses, and from which our gorse-fields have hardly yet recovered, while it injured nearly every plant and tree on south walls and in sheltered borders, and in all forward situations, spared the tender est kinds on north walls and exposed places ; and in Scotland the destruction was hardly felt at all. It was the backwardness of their growing state that saved these plants ; and the knowledge of this fact has already been brought to bear in several recent experiments. The double yellow rose, for instance, one of the most delicate of its class, is now flowered with great success in a northern exposition. It has led men also to study the hybernation of plants — perhaps the most important research in which horticulturists have of late engaged ; and it has been ascertained that this state of winter-rest is a most important element in
HYBERNATION OF PLANTS. 71
their constitution ; but no doubt it will also be found that — as the dormouse, the sloth, the snake, the mole, &c., undergo a greater or less degree of tor- pidity, and some require it not at all — so in plants, the length and degree will vary much in different species, and according to their state of artificial cul- tivation. As a general rule, young gardeners must take heed not prematurely to force the juices into action in spring, nor to keep them too lively in winter, unless they are well prepared with good and sufficient protection till all the frosts are over. The practical effect of these observations will be, that many pknts which have hitherto only been culti- vated by those who have had flues and greenhouses at their command, will now be grown in as great or greater perfection by those who can afford them a dry, though not a warm shelter. One instance may serve as an example : the scarlet geranium, one of the greatest treasures of our parterres, if taken up from the ground in autumn, after the wood is thoroughly ripened, and hung up in a dry room, without any soil attaching to it, will be found ready, the next spring, to start in a new life of vigour and beauty.
One characteristic of our native plants we must mention, that,, if we miss in them something of the gorgeousncss and lustre of more tropical flowers, we are more than compensated by the delicacy and variety of their perfume ; and just as our woods, vocal with the nightingale, the blackbird, and the thrush, can well spare the gaudy feathers of the macaw, so can we resign the oncidiums, the cactuses^
72 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
and the ipomaeas of the Tropics, for the delicious fragrance of our wild banks of violets, our lilies-of- the- valley, and our woodbine, or even for the passing whiff of a hawthorn bush, a clover or bean field, or a gorse -common.
With such hedgerow flowers within his reach, and in so favourable a climate, it is not to be wondered that the garden of the English cottager has been remarked among our national distinctions. These may be said to form the foreground of that peculiar English scenery which is filled up by our hedge- rows and our parks. The ingenious authoress of ' Leila in England ' makes the little new-landed girl exclaim for the want of "fountain-trees" and " green parrots." This is true to nature — but not less so the real enthusiasm of Miss Sedgwick, on her first arriving in England, at the cottage-gardens of the Isle of Wight. Again and again she fixes upon them as the most pleasing and striking feature in a land where everything was new to her. Long may they so continue ! It is a trait of which England may well be proud ; for it speaks — would we could trace it everywhere ! — of peace, and of the leisure, and comfort, and contentedness of those who " shall never cease from the land/'
We would even make gardens in general a test of national prosperity and happiness. As long as the British nobleman continues to take an interest in his avenues and hot-houses — his lady in her conserva- tories and parterres — the squire overlooks his labourers1 allotments — the "squiresses and squirinas"
BLESSINGS OF GARDENING 73
betake themselves and their flowers to the neigh- bouring horticultural show — the citizen sets up his cucumber-frame in his back-yard — his dame her lilacs and alrnond-trees in the front-court — the mechanic breeds his prize-competing auriculas — the cottager rears his sun-flowers and Sweet- Williams before his door — and even the collier sports his " posy jacket " — as long, in a word, as this common interest pervades every class of society, so long shall we cling to the hope that our country is destined to outlive all her difliculties and dangers. Not because, like the Peris, we fight with flowers, and build amaranth bowers, and bind our enemies in links of roses — but because all this implies mutual interest and intercourse of every rank, and dependence of one class upon another — because it promotes an inter- change of kindnesses and favours — because it speaks of proprietors dwelling on their hereditary acres, and the poorest labourer having an interest in the soil — because it gives a local attachment, and healthy exercise and innocent recreation, and excites a love of the country and love of our own country, and a spirit of emulation, devoid of bitterness — because it tells of wealth wisely spent, and competence wisely diffused, of taste cultivated, and science practically applied — because, unlike Napoleon's great lie, it does bring " peace to the cottage," while it blesses the palace, and every virtuous home between those wide extremes — because it bespeaks the appreciation of what is natural, and simple, and pure — teaches men to set the divine law of excellence above the low
74 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
liuman standard of utility — and because, above all, in the most lovely and bountiful of God's works, it leads them up to Him that made them, not in a mere dumb, inactive admiration of His wonderful designs, but to bless Him that He has given them pleasures beyond their actual necessities — the means of a cheerful countenance, as well as of a strong heart.
Still more— because — if ours be not too rude a step to venture within such hallowed ground — it speaks of a Christian people employed in an occu- pation which, above all others, is the parable that conveys the deepest truths to them — which daily reads them silent lessons, if their hearts will hear, of the vanity of earthly pomp, of the beauty of hea- venly simplicity, and purity, and lowliness of mind, of contentment and unquestioning faith — which sets before them, in the thorns and thistles, a remem- brance of their fallen state— in the cedar, and the olive, and the palm-tree, the promise of a better country — which hourly recalls to their mind the Agony and the Burial of Him who made a garden the scene of both, and who bade us mark and consider such things, how they bud, and " how they grow," giving us in the vine a type of His Church, and in the fig-tree of His Coming.
Again, we would ask those who think that national amelioration is to be achieved only by dose upon dose of Eeform or Ked-t apery, where should we now have been without our savings-banks, our allotment system, and our cottage-gardens? And lest we
TO THE POOR MAN. 75
should be thought to have been led away from flowers to the more general subject, we will add that, when we see a plot set apart for a rose-bush, and a gilliflower, and a carnation, it is enough for us : if the jasmine and the honeysuckle embower the porch without, we may be sure that there is a potato and a cabbage and an onion for the pot within : if there be not plenty there, at least there is no want ; if not happiness, the nearest approach to it in this world — content.
*' Yes ! in the poor man's garden grow,
Far more than herbs and flowers ; Kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind, And joy for weary hours."
Gardening not only affords common ground for the high and low, but, like Christianity itself, it offers peculiar blessings and privileges to the poor man, which the very possession of wealth denies. " The Spitalfields weaver may derive more pleasure from his green box of smoked auriculas " than the lordly possessors of Sion, or Chatsworth, or Stowe, or Alton, from their hundreds of decorated acres ; because not only personal superintendence, but actual work, is necessary for the true enjoyment of a garden. We must know our flowers, as well as buy them. Our great-grandmothers, who — before they were great- grandmothers — " flirted on the sunny terraces, or strolled along the arched and shaded alleys " of our old manor-houses,
'* had their own little garden, where they knew every flower, because they were few ; and every name, because they were
76 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
simple. Their rose-bushes and gilliflowers were dear to them, because themselves had pruned, and watered, and watched them — had marked from day to day their opening buds, and removed their fading blossoms — and had cherished each choicest specimen for the posy to be worn at the christening of the squire's heir, or on my lord's birthday."
In a like strain the wise and good author of ' Human Life ' beautifully says —
" I would not have my garden too extended ; not because flowers are not the most delicious things, speaking to the senti- ments as well as to the senses, but on account of the intrinsic and superior value of moderation. When interests are divided, they are not so strong. Three acres of flowers and a regi- ment of gardeners bring no more pleasure than a sufficiency. Besides which, in the smaller possession there is more room for the mental pleasure to step in and refine all that which is sensual. We become acquainted, as it were, and even form friendships, with individual flowers. We bestow more care upon their bringing up and progress. They seem sensible of our favour, absolutely to enjoy it, and make pleasing returns by their beauty, health, and sweetness. In this respect a hundred thousand roses, which we look at en masse, do not identify themselves in the same manner as even a very small border ; and hence, if the cottager's mind is properly attuned, the little cottage-garden may give him more real delight than belongs to the owner of a thousand acres. All this is so entirely nature, that, give me a garden well kept, however small, two or three spreading trees, and a mind at ease, and I defy the world."
Nor do we find anything contravening this in Cowley's wish that he might have " a small house and large garden, few friends and many books." Doubtless he coveted neither the Bodleian nor Chats-
TO THE CLERGY. 77
worth, and intended his garden to be " large " only in comparison with his other possessions.
It is this limited expenditure and unlimited in- terest which a garden requires, combined with the innocence of the amusement, that renders it so great a blessing— more even than to the cottager himself — to the country clergyman. We must leave to the novelist to sketch the happy party which every sum- mer's evening finds busied on many an English vicarage-lawn, with their trowels and watering-pots, and all the paraphernalia of amateur gardeners ; though we may ask the utilitarian, if he would deign to scan so simple a group, from the superintending vicar to the water-carrying schoolboy, where he would better find developed " the greatest happi- ness of the greatest number" than among those very objects and that very occupation where utility is not only banished, but condemned.
We would have our clergy know that there is no readier way to a parishioner's heart — next to visit- ing his house, which, done in health and in sickness, is the keystone of our blessed parochial system — than to visit his garden, suggesting and superintending improvements, distributing seeds, and slips, and flowers, and lending or giving such gardening books as would be useful for his limited domain. And many a poor scholar, in some obscure curacy, out of the way of railroads and book-clubs,
" In life's stillest shade reclining, In desolation unrepining, Without a hope on earth to find A mirror in an answering mind,"
THE FLOWER GARDEN.
lias made the moral and intellectual wilderness in which he is cast bloom for him in his trees, and herbs, and flowers ; and if unable, from the narrow- ness of his means and situation,
" To raise the ten-ace or to sink the grot,"
has found his body refreshed and his spirits lightened, in growing the salad to give a relish to his simple meal, and the flower to bedeck his threadbare but- ton-hole,— enabled by these recreations to bear up against those little every-day annoyances which, though hardly important enough to tax our faith or our philosophy, make up, in an ill-regulated or un- employed mind, the chief ills of life.
Pope, who professed that of all his works he was most proud of his garden, said also, with more nature and truth, that he " pitied that man who had com- pleted everything in his garden." To pull down and destroy is quite as natural to man as to build up and improve, and this love of alteration may help to account for the many changes of style in gardening that have taken place. The course of the seasons, the introduction of new flowers, the growth of trees, will always of themselves give the gardener enough to do ; and if the flower-garden is perfect, and there is a nook of spare ground at hand, instead of extend- ing his parterres, which to be neat must needs be circumscribed, he had better devote it to an arbore- tum for choice trees and shrubs ; or take up with some one extensive class — as for a thornery or a pinery ; or make it a wilderness-like mixture of all
SEEDLINGS.
79
kinds. Such ground will not require mowing more than twice or thrice in the year, and will afford much pleasure, without much labour and expense. If there is a little damp nook or dell, with rock- work and water at command, let it by all means be made a fernery, for which Mr. Newman's book will supply plenty of materials.
But we are straying too far from our immediate subject of flower-gardens and flowers, and with a few more remarks upon the latter we must bring this dissertation to a close : otherwise we should have something to say of the unique beauties of Eedleaf, and the splendid Italian garden lately de- signed at Trentham by the genius of Mr. Barry ; something more too of the gorgeous new importations which every day is now bringing, some for the first time, into blossom. We are even promised new varieties of orchideous plants from Mr. Eollisson's experiments in raising seedlings for the first time in this country.
To produce new seedling varieties of one's own, by hybridizing and other mysteries of the priests of Flora, is indeed the highest pleasure and the deepest esotericism of the art. The impregnating them is to ventiire within the very secrets of creation, and the naming them carries us back to one of the highest privileges of our first parents. The offspring be- comes our own c^yov ; which, according to Aristotle, claims the highest degree of our love. We should feel that, in leaving them, we were leaving friends, and address them in the words of Eve, •
80 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
" 0 flowers,
My early visitation and my last At even, which I had bred up with tender hand From the first opening bud, and gave ye names, Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount ? "
Par. Lost, xi.
We cannot but admire the practice of the Church of Rome, which calls in the aid of floral decorations on her high festivals. Though we feel convinced that it is the most bounden duty of the Church of England, at the present moment, to give no un- necessary offence by restorations in indifferent mat- ters, we should be inclined to advocate, notwith- standing the denunciations of some of the early Fathers, an exception in the case of our own favourites. We shall not easily forget the effect of a long avenue of orange-trees in the Cathedral of St. Gudule at Brussels, calling to mind as it did the expression of the Psalmist — " Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God." The white lily is held throughout Spain and Italy the emblem of the Virgin's purity, and frequently decorates her shrines ; and many other flowers, dedicated to some saint, are used in profusion on the day of his celebration. The oak- leaf and the palm-branch have with us their loyal and religious anniversary, and the holly still gladdens the hearts of all good Churchmen at Christmas — a custom which the Puritans never succeeded in effacing from the most cant-ridden parish in the kingdom. Latterly, flowers have been much used among us in festivals, and processions, and gala-days
FLOWER-DECORATION. 81
of all kinds — the dahlia furnishing, in its symmetry and variety of colouring, an excellent material for those who perhaps in their young days sowed their own initials in mustard-and-cress, to inscribe in their maturer years their sovereign's name in flowers. Flowering plants and shrubs are at the same time becoming more fashionable in our London ball-rooms. No dread of " noxious exhalations " deters mammas from decorating their halls and staircases with flowers of every hue and fragrance, nor their daughters from braving the headaches and pale cheeks which are said to arise from such innocent and beautiful causes. We would go one step further, and replace all artifi- cial flowers by natural ones, on the dinner-table and in the hair. Some of the more amaranthine flowers, as the camellia and the hoya, which can bear the heat of crowded rooms, or those of regular shapes, as the dahlia and others, would, we are sure, with a little contrivance in adjusting and preserving them, soon eclipse the most artistical wreaths of Natier or Foster; and we will venture to promise a good partner for a waltz and for life to the first fair debutante who will take courage to adopt the natural flower in her " sunny locks."
THE
POETRY OF GARDENING:
Liiia mista rosis." — School Exercise.
'* GOD ALMIGHTY first planted a garden, and indeed it is the purest of all human pleasures." I love Lord Bacon for that saying more than for his being the author of the ' Novum Organon.' Willingly I would give up his four folio volumes of philosophy for his one little book of Essays, and all these for his one little Essay on Garden- ing. It is indeed only by the study of " those fragments of his conceits," as he calls them, that the full compass of that great man's mind can be understood. He did not think it beneath his philosophy to descant on such toys as the ordering of a Masque and the dressing of a Garden. He discusses, with perfect love of the subject, how " the colours that show best by candlelight are white, car- nation, and a kind of sea-water green ;" and how that " ouches or spangs, as they are of no great cost, so are they of most glory," and recommends, with the very refinement of luxury, as " things of great pleasure and refreshment, some sweet odours suddenly coming forth " on the com- pany, in the midst of the entertainment.
With a still greater love and adoption of his subject, he enters into the description of how royally he would order his Garden. Dear old Evelyn himself never eyed with
* See p. 55.
G2
84 THE FLOWER GARDEN".
more complacency his four hundred feet of holly " blush- ing with its natural coral," than Bacon does his phantastic vision of a " stately arched hedge," and " over every arch a little turret, with belly enough to receive a cage of birds, and over every space between the arches some other little figure, with broad plates of round coloured glass for the sun to play upon." I envy not that man's heart who can view with indifference the great philosopher indulging in his day-dreams of a spacious pleasaunce, where fruits from the orange to the service tree, and flowers from the stately hollyhock to the tuft of wild thyme, are to flourish, each in its proper place ; " there should be the pale daffodil and the clove-gilliflower, and the almond and apple-tree in blossom, and roses of all kinds, * some removed to come in late,' so that you may have * ver perpetuum ' all the year through."
Lord Bacon has indeed left us little to wish in the Poetry of Gardening. His prince -like design of a de- mesne of thirty acres, containing " a green at the entrance, a heath or desert in the going forth, the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides," combines the natural and artificial styles in their most perfect features ; and if he realized in his retreat at Gorhambury but the outline of his splendid vision, the gardens of the Hesperides, or of Hafiz, could have no greater charm.
Of all the vain assumptions of these coxcomical times, that which arrogates the pre-eminence in the true science of gardening is the vainest. True, our conservatories are full of the choicest plants from every clime ; we ripen the grape and the pine-apple with an art unknown before, and even the mango, the mangosteen, and the guava, are made to yield their matured fruits; but the real beauty and poetry of a garden are lost in our efforts after rarity, and
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 85
strangeness, and variety. To be the possessor of a unique pansy, the introducer of a new specimen of the Orchi- dacese, or the cultivator of five hundred choice varieties of the dahlia, is now the only claim to gardening celebrity and Horticultural medals.
And then our lot has fallen in the evil days of System. We are proud of our natural or English style ; and scores of unmeaning flower-beds, disfiguring the lawn in the shapes of kidneys, and tadpoles, and sausages, and leeches, and commas, are the result. Landscape-gardening has encroached too much upon gardening-proper ; and this has had the same effect upon our gardens that horticultural societies have had on our fruits, — to make us entertain the vulgar notion that size is virtue.
The picturesquians have fortunately had their day, and wholesale manufacturers of by-lanes and dilapidated cot- tages are no longer in vogue in our parks ; but they seem yet to linger about our parterres, though they have far less business here, and indeed should never for a moment have been allowed a footing, — for there are no greater extremes in art than a garden and a picture.
If we review the various styles that have prevailed in England, from the knotted gardens of Elizabeth, the pleach- work and intricate flower-borders of James I., the painted Dutch statues and canals of William and Mary, the wind- ing gravel walks and lake-making of Brown, to poor Shen- stone's sentimental farm, and the landscape-fashion of the present day, — we shall have little reason to pride ourselves on the advance which national taste has made upon the earliest efforts in this department.
If I am to have a system at all, give me the good old system of terraces and angled walks, and dipt yew-hedges, against whose dark and rich verdure the bright old-fashioned
86 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
flowers glittered in the sun. I love the topiary art, with its trimness and primness, and its open avowal of its arti- ficial character. It repudiates at the first glance the sculking and cowardly " celare artem " principle, and, in its vegetable sculpture, is the properest transition from the architecture of the house to the natural beauties of the grove and paddock.
Who, to whom the elegance, and gentlemanliness, and poetry, — the Boccaccio-spirit — of a scene of Watteau is familiar, does not regret the devastation made by tasty innovators upon the grounds laid out in the times of the Jameses and Charleses ? As for old Noll, I am certain, though I have not a jot of evidence, that he cared no more for a garden than for an anthem ; he would as lief have sacrificed the verdant sculpture of a yew-peacock as the time-honoured tracery of a cathedral shrine ; and his crop- eared soldiery would have had as great satisfaction in bivouacking in the parterres of a " royal pleasaunce " as in the presence-chamber of a royal palace. It were a sorrow beyond tears to dwell on the destruction of garden-stuff in those king-killing times. Thousands, doubtless, of broad- paced terraces and trim vegetable conceits sunk in the same ruin with their mansions and their masters : and, alas f modern taste has followed in the footsteps of ancient fanaticism. How many old associations have been rooted up with the knotted stumps of yew and hornbeam ! And Oxford too in the van of reform f Beautiful as are St. John's gardens, who would not exchange them for the very walks and alleys along which Laud, in all the pardonable pride of collegiate lionizing, conducted his illustrious guests Charles and Henrietta? Who does not grieve thp.t we must now inquire in vain for the bowling-green in Christ Church, where Cranmer solaced the weariness of his last
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 87
confinement ? And who lately, in reading Scott's life, but must have mourned in sympathy with the poet over the destruction of " the huge hill of leaves," and the yew and hornbeam hedges of the " Garden " at Kelso ?
In those days of arbours and bowers, Gardening was an art, not a mystery ; and such an art that the simplest maid could comprehend it. They who loved could learn. The only initiation required was into the arcana of the herb-garden, and the concoction of simples. This was as necessary a part of education then, as to sing Italian now. All the rest was as easy and plain as Nature herself. There was no need to study Monogynia and Icosandria, to pore over the difference of Liliacese and Aristolochiae ; Linngean and Jussieuan factions contorted not pretty mouths with crackjaw words of Aristophanic length and difficulty ; nor did blundering gardeners expose their igno- rance and conceit by barbaric compounds and insufferable misnomers. They had no new plants introduced from Mexico with the euphonic and engaging designation of Iztactepetzacuxochitl Icoliueyo* to be rechristened with some more scientific but scarcely less ponderous synonym.
In those days ladies were neither botanists nor florists, but simple gardeners, and not landscape-gardeners, with their fifty acres of shrubberies and a gardener to every acre ; but they had their own little garden, where they knew every flower, because they were few, and every name, be- cause they were simple. Their rose-bushes and their gilliflowers were dear to them, because themselves had pruned and watered and watched them — had marked from day to day their opening buds, and removed their faded blossoms, and had cherished each choicest specimen for the
* Vide Bot. Reg., No. 13, and Harrison's Flor. Cab. for April, 1838.
THE FLOWER GARDEN.
posy to be worn on the christening of the squire's heir, or on my lord's birthday.
They could discourse without pedantry on the collection of simple and native flowers which composed their un- stinted nosegay, and could quiz their partners in pure Saxon anthology, without having studied printed treatises on the Language of Flowers. No Arab girl knew better how to open her heart by love tokens, than did they how to settle a coxcomb cockney with a bunch of " London- pride;" to roast a quizzical anti-Benedict with a dressing of "bachelor's buttons;" or to mystify some aspiring cornet with a "jackanapes-on- horseback." None better knew, as they flirted on the sunny terraces, or strolled, not unaccompanied, along the arched and shaded alleys,
" By all those token flowers, that tell What words can never speak as well,"
to hint the speechless misery of a broken and deserted heart, as they culled a sprig of " love-lies-bleeding ;" or to encourage the bashful passion of some ingenuous swain, who dared hardly breathe his youthful aspirings, till gifted with the soothing symbol of a bunch of " heartsease."
" Heureux 1'aimable botaniste Qui salt jouir de ces douceurs ! "
The " forget-me-not " is the only real flower of senti- ment descended to these degenerate days, and even this is a wild flower, and has been so overwhelmed with the en- comiums of Annual and Album poets, that its bright blue petals and tiny yellow eye have almost ceased to please beyond the precincts of the boarding-school.
And now that all our old-fashioned flowers and English names are eschewed for our modern exotics and Latin hen- decasyllables, no one must dare to talk of a garden unless
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 89
he is advertised of the last Orchideous arrival at Loddiges', and can master the 500 pages of the Hortus Britannicus. It was considered the summit of art in Shakspeare's days, as we learn from the ' Winter's Tale,' to streak the gilli- flower ; _, and that garden was accounted rich that could boast a carnation. Rosemary and rue for the old — hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, and marigolds, for the middle-aged — daffodils, dim violets, pale primroses, bold oxlips, the crown-imperial,
" lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-lis being one,"
for the young; — these were flowers that had their place in the earliest associations of the gallants and their lady-loves, and their rank in the brightest page of the poet.
Unlike the untractable nomenclature of the present day, their familiar names entwined themselves in immortal verse with as easy and natural a grace as they clustered in their native beds, or wreathed themselves round the brow of beauty. The same flowers were at once the property of the poet and the belle ; the " posie " was common to both ; and maidens could cull their May garlands to the minstrel's theme, as they sang
" When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men, for thus sings he,
Cuckoo, cuckoo ! "
" The azurecl harebell," the pale daffodil, the golden crocus, the crisped hyacinth, the columbine, the buglosse, the eglantine, and the primrose,
" Most musical, most melancholy,"
90 THE FLOWER GARDEX.
breathed poetry from their very birth, and needed not the foreign aid of ornament to attract the homage of the bard. But what poetaster will adventure to sing the glories of a modern ball-room bouquet? Who shall build lofty verse with such materials as " polypodium aspenifolimn," "me- sembryanthemum pinnatifidum," and " cardiospermum hali- cacabum," and other graces of our gardens,
" quas versu dicere non est" ? —
Even prose will hardly endure such intruders, and I know no author but Miss Mitford who has even attempted, with the least success, to render classic the names of our modem importations.
Nor is it in names, only that much of the poetry of our garden has departed. In the flowers themselves we have too often made a change for the worse. What shall we say of the taste that has discarded the hollyhock — the only landscape-flower we possess ? Do the gaudy hues of the stiff and formal dahlia recompense for the loss of its bold clusters of flowers, breaking the horizon with an obelisk of colour ? Why has the painter been so long in reclaiming his own ? By far the finest effect that combined art and nature ever produced in gardening were those fine masses of many-coloured hollyhocks clustered round a weather- tinted vase, such as Sir Joshua delighted to place in the wings of his pictures. And what more magnificent than a long avenue of these floral giants, the double and the single, not too straightly tied, backed by a dark thick hedge of old-fashioned yew? Yet how seldom, now-a- days, is either of these sights to be seen ! The dahlia has banished the hollyhock, with its old friend, the sunflower, into the cottage garden, where it still flanks the little walk that leads from the wicket to the porch— not the only in-
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 91
stance in which our national taste has been redeemed by the cottager, against the vulgar pretensions of overgrown luxury and wealth.
We need not deny the dahlia his due, though he is a bit of a coxcomb. Its rich velvety and chiseled petals, and the extraordinary variety and beauty of its colours, claim for it one of the highest ranks among florists' flowers ; but, then, immediately a flower becomes a florist's flower, it loses half its poetry. Who can endure the pedantry that proses over the points of a polyanthus ? —
" The glorious flower which bore the prize away ! "
And have not horticultural shows and prizes almost removed the dahlia out of our poetical sympathies ? Above all, its odious distinctive names pall upon our senses. Who can care about the " Metropolitan Purple," " Diadem of Perfection," or the '« Suffolk Hero" ? Who can wish to point out in his garden "Lord Lyndhurst" cheek by jowl with " the Quakeress," " Lord Durham " in rivalry with " Yellow Perfection," or " Lovely Anne " escorted by " Sir Isaac Newton " ? — to say nothing of such classic designations as " Jim Crow," <; Leonardy," " Summum Bonum," " O'Connell," " King Boy," and " Master Buller," and the thousand other et ceteras with which the nurserymen's lists abound. Besides, one tires of disquisitions on its " showy habit," and " cupped petals," and " extra fine shape," and all the nicely-regulated enthu- siasm of the ultra-florist.
" This, this is beauty ; cast, I pray, your eyes On this my glory ! see the grace ! the size ! Was ever stem so tall, so stout, so strong, Exact in breadth, in just proportion long ? These brilliant hues are all distinct and clean, No kindred tint, no blending streaks between ; This is no shaded, run-off, pin-eyed thing, A king of flowers, a flower for England's King ! "
92 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
If you are to admire a flower only by rules and canons, you may as well not admire at all. 1 will willingly allow an artist or a connoisseur to point out to me the beauties of a fine painting, because art alone can fully appreciate and explain art, but a fine flower is given to me as much as to you ; you shall not dictate artificial laws by which to judge of Nature's beauty. If it speaks not to my heart at once, no learned lecture will ever make it beautiful to me. I will admire no statute-coloured tulips, nor act-of-parliament polyanthuses.
I really liked heartsease till florists called them pansies — a pretty name though, and Shakspearian too — and put a thousand and one varieties in their catalogues, advertising flowers " as big as a penny piece ;" and what, in the name of moderation, is one to do with "four thousand new seedling, shrubby calceolarias, all named varieties," beau- tiful as they doubtless all are ? If we are really called upon to get up this vocabulary, better return to the days when that little bright yellow globule, the first-introduced, and that rare and curious English flower, " my lady's slipper," were the only types of the tribe. When florists drive matters to such extremities as these, there is but one way out of it. We must wait awhile, a reaction will take place ; the less showy sorts will gradually be disre- garded, despite their solemn rules ; we shall select those only that generally please, and Nature will again recover her sway.
Woe unto the flower that becomes the fashion ! It is as sure to be spoilt as the belle of the season. How well I remember the coming out, the first introduction, of that brilliant little creature the scarlet verbena ! It was engaged a hundred deep the moment it appeared ; the gardening world was utterly infatuated, and fifteen florists, balked in
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 93
their possession of it, hanged themselves in their own potting-houses. Well, it figured at every horticultural show for the first five years, was petted, caressed, was f£ted — its admirers continued hourly to increase ; but now it has twenty rival sisters and cousins of the same name and family. Each new debutante is sought after more eagerly than the last; and the original, though still as beautiful and as lustrous as ever, stands comparatively un- noticed in its solitary pot — a regular wTall-flower !
Even to go back very, very far. In one respect the gardens of the ancients surpassed our own. They did not think a beautiful-blossomed tree unfit for the pleasure- ground merely because it produced fruit. Whereas, with us, no sooner is a tree known to be a fruit-bearer, than it is banished to the kitchen-garden. We cultivate, as an ornamental shrub, the barren almond, whose delicate pink flower,
" That hangs on a leafless bough,"
is one of Spring's earliest harbingers ; but how few care to admire the blushing bloom of the apple-tree ! and who ever planted some of the more handsome-growing sorts for their effect in the shrubbery, or on the lawn ? If it bore no fruit, we should doubtless prize it more. Can anvthing be more elegant in its habit, its blossom, and its fruit, than a standard morella cherry ? and yet how few flower-gardens tolerate it ! Is anything bolder in the out- line of its leaves and fruit than a standard medlar ? But then it is edible. The rich mulberry colour of the foliage of the pear-tree in September is by far the finest of autumnal tints ; but because we might also gather from it some rich juicy fruit, therefore no one dreams of planting it for its beauty.
94 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
Again, the scarlet runner, if it were not one of our best vegetables, would be ranked among our choicest creepers. The cottager alone knows how to turn this beautiful plant to its two-fold purpose of use and ornament. So a straw- berry bed, if rightly managed, might be as grateful to the sight in spring, and to the smell in autumn, as it is to the taste in summer.
" The gadding vine " must, I fear, to become fruitful, still be trained to our brick walls, but what prevents '^its trailing also over our arbours and trellis-work (the leaf of some of its varieties is peculiarly graceful) but the fear of its utilitarian aspect ? One may venture to prophesy that ere long the " Passiflora edulis " and " Musa Cavendishii " will be transferred from the conservatory to the hothouse for no other reason than their fruitfulness ; just as now the bitter orange is more often cultivated than the sweet one, though the same expense and attention might supply the household with the latter. This is really carrying matters to an absurd extreme. Flora forfend that the Utilitarians should ever seize upon our gardens, and turn our lawns into kaleyards (thank Heaven ! flowers will remain a living argument against their system till the end of time) ; but let us not be driven to the equal barbarism of the other extreme — let us not discard a beautiful tree, or shrub, or flower, the moment we know that it will produce fruit, and condemn it forthwith to the dull monotony and formal propriety of the kitchen-garden. Our fruit-trees may com- plain, with like justice, in the verses of Ovid's 'Walnut;7 if not pelted, they are at least snubbed.
" Nil ego peccavi : nisi si peccare videtur
Annua cultori porna referre suo, Fructus obest : peperisse nocet : nocet esse feracem."
Away, then, with this vulgar and cockney dread of use-
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 95
fulness. It belongs not to the poetry, but to the mock sentimentalism of gardening. Are the gardens of the Hes- perides less beautiful because of their golden fruit ? Did Ulysses less admire the gardens of Alcinous for their pears and pomegranates, their figs and olives ?
crvKai re yXvuepai, Kal eAoTcu T7jAe0oco<rat.
Od. i). 115.
The "brilliant-fruited" trees were rightly reckoned the garden's greatest ornament.
In the description of the Corycian veteran's reclaimed plot of waste— the most exquisite description of an humble garden that poet ever drew — .the first apple of autumn is as much his pride as the first rose of spring. Nor was his care of his hyacinths the less because his simple herbs offered him an unbought feast at nightfall. Of all the books that were never written — I think D'Israeli has a paper on such a subject — surely the one of all others most to be regretted is Virgil's * Garden.' Though the fruit- trees and esculent vegetables were doubtless among the Romans the main object of their gardening, yet it is a great mistake to suppose that flowers were not also cultivated solely for their own sake, and these Virgil would not have forgotten.
" nee sera comantem Narcissum, aut flexi tacuissem vimen acanthi.'
The Georgics were the poet's labour of love ; and when we see how, in " wood and fell," he rises above the tame monotony of " arms and the man," we cannot but love to dream over the splendid passages which his * Garden' would have suggested, and picture to ourselves how glori-
96 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
ously his spirit would have revelled among "the rose- gardens of Paestum."
It cannot be out of place here to insert part of that de- scription I have just alluded to, unsurpassed as it is by ancient or modern poetry.
" Sub (Ebaliae memini me turribus arcis,
Qua niger humectat flaventia culta Galsesus, Corycium vidisse senem, cui pauca relicti Jugera ruris erant : nee fertilis ilia juvencis Nee pecori opportuna seges, nee commoda Baecho. Hie rarum tamen in dumis olus albaque circum Lilia verbenasque premens, vescumque papaver, Regum aequabat opes animls : seraque revertens Nocte domum dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis. Primus vere rosam, atque auctumno carpere poma ; Et, quum tristis hyems etiarn nunc frigore saxa Rumperet, et glacie cursus frenaret aquarum, Ille comam mollis jam tondebat hyacinthi, /Estatem increpitans seram zephyrosque morantes."
Georg., iv. 125.
Most writers on gardening have treated of the Grecian and Roman gardens as if they were simply orchards. They were in fact, what we may hope to restore, a mixture of fruit and flowers. That they loved flowers for their own sake might be witnessed by numberless passages from Aristophanes* and Ovid, both of whom clearly show by
* Passim, and especially the choruses in the 'Aves/ We learn, too, from him, that there was a flower-market at Athens. For Ovid, see, among many others, the charming description of the aymphs " in the fair field of Enna gathering flowers :" —
" Hsec implet lento calathos e vimine textos : Hsec gremium, laxos degravat ilia sinus. Ilia legit calthas : huic sunt violaria curse : i Ilia papavereas subsecat ungue comas.
Has, hyacinthe. tenes : illas, amaranthe, moraris :
Pars thyma, pars casiam, pars meliloton amant.
Plurima lecta rosa est, et sunt sine nomine flores :
Ipsa crocos tenues liliaque alba legit."
Let me add one other picture of a Flower-girl — the matchless Murillo in the Dulwich Gallery.
THE POETKY OF GARDENING. 97
their writings that they were votaries of Flora. The difficulty is in identifying the ancient names with modern specimens, and thus the " violet - crowned " Athenians become as great a mystery to us as the chaplet of " parsley" for the victor at the Olympic games. I am inclined to think that the Greeks understood the poetry of flowers better than the Romans, or how could the latter have endured the licentiousness of the Floralia, and made, oh shame! the obscene Priapus the protecting deity of their gardens ? Perhaps no greater instance could be alleged of the de- pravity of human nature, when given up to the debasing influences of a god-multiplying superstition, than that " the purest of all human pleasures " was made the occasion of their most infamous rites, and that " the lilies of the field," the emblem of simplicity to man, were committed to the tutelage of the god of lust !
The formal style which the ancients adopted in their pleasure-grounds — as Cicero at his Tusculan villa — was perhaps better suited to the introduction of fruit-trees than our more modern system. The very order of their vines, which Virgil compares to the rank and file of a Roman legion, and of their olives, which were under the eye of Morian Jove himself, while they afforded them avenues for shade, were also conducive to the best development of the virtues of the tree. So also, in the Elizabethan and Dutch styles, the espaliers harmonized better with the pleach- work of the rest of the garden than they could be made to do in the Natural style. But still, those who have seen the hanging orchards of Lanark, —
" Clydesdale's apple-bowers,"
— in the end of the merry month of May, or the tamer beauties of the cider counties of England, may well regret
98 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
the edict of modern taste, that banishes such beautiful nosegays from the spring, because of their almost equal beauties in autumn. Surely we might, with the best effect, recall from the slovenly orchard, and the four unpoetical walls of the kitchen-garden, some of those fruit-trees which graced the gardens of antiquity.
At least, about our farm-houses and our villas, the wal- nut and the mulberry would afford as good a shelter, and as pleasing an effect, as the everlasting plantations of firs and larches. I can fancy a fair lawn, mown by the scythe, or cropped by sheep, as the case may be, in which fruit- trees might be so grouped, with reference to their blossom and foliage, as to produce a beautiful garden-scene the whole year round ; if cattle were excluded, there is no reason why honeysuckles and climbing roses should not twine around the stems ; and who would wish for fairer pleasure-ground than this?
If indeed we would imitate the most perfect specimens of nature's gardening ; if we would realize the most beau- tiful visions of the poets (generally indeed alleged as the fore- shadow ers of the modern style) ; if the fabled regions of the Hesperides and Adonis, — the Homeric picture of Calypso's grot, and the gardens of Alcinous and Laertes, — Petrarch's Vaucluse, and Tasso's garden of Armida,— if Milton's Paradise, — if these, or any of them, are to be the types of our pleasure-grounds, we shall not fear to mix our fruits with our flowers ; a new feature will be added to the English style, — the garden will be made to rejoice in an ornament that it knew not before :
" Miraturque novos frondes et non sua poma."
And I have been writing on, all this long and weary time, and never asked you, reader, " whether you were
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 99
fond of flowers ? " Yet, if you have borne with me thus far, I may well presume that you love them. Indeed, I say of flowers, as the poet has said of music ; he that hath no love of them in his soul,
" Let not that man be trusted."
Nor do I believe that I am singular in my opinion. I remember hearing the health of a very good friend of mine proposed at a public dinner, which was neither a Political nor a Horticultural one, in which, after some other remarks, his merits were summed up in these words, — "he is an excellent Conservative, and fond of flowers." The guests fully appreciated this philosophic eulogium, and may be said literally to have stamped their approbation by the enthusiasm of their applause.
If then a true brother of the trowel and rake, — if, in chubby childhood, you ever strung daisy necklaces, " bonnie gems," for your pet sister, — if you ever tested your brother's taste for butter by the chin-applied king- cup^ — and told nurse what hour it was by the dandelion- clock ; — if you ever sowed your own or your sweetheart's initials in mustard-and-cress, — frightened the baby with a snap-dragon, — mercilessly watered to death an often- potted primrose, — soaked your nankeens to the skin in fetching water for mamma, — or watched with unavailing assiduity the expected crop of long-sown siugar-plums : if, in boyhood, you ever screamed for joy at the discovery of a bee-orchis, hunted the wortleberry and the pig-nut to their retreats, and returned home from the copse wood loaded with blue-bells and wild anemones for the children's garden : if afterwards, under
" The lime at eve Diffusing odours,"
you braided the white bind- weed and the glossy leaves
H2
100 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
and berries of the bryony in the hair of (shall I tell
her name ?) : if now, grown sober and prosaic, you have yet life enough in you to rise and be stirring
" When winking mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes,"
to be the first to view the long-expected blowing of some seedling rhododendron of your own, or some Bengal rose which your Indian brother has sent over 9000 miles of ocean — the seed gathered by his own hand in his own garden on the banks of Gunga's stream : — if " the pink- eyed pimpernel " in the hedge- row is as dear to you as the choicest oncidium in the conservatory ; and, while you honour " the fruit at once and flower " of the voluptuous orange-tree, you despise not my poor fern, a pilfered me- morial from Kenil worth: — if all these "ifs" have not tired you to death, and you are not heartily bothered with my prosing, come, take a stroll with me, while I show you my garden as it is, or is to be.
My garden should lie to the south of the house ; the ground gradually sloping for some short way till it falls abruptly into the dark and tangled shrubberies that all but hide the winding brook below. A broad terrace, half as wide, at least, as the house is high, should run along the whole southern length of the building, extending to the western side also, whence, over the distant country, I may catch the last red light of the setting sun. I must have some musk and noisette roses, and jasmine, to run up the mullions of my oriel window, and honeysuckles and clematis, the white, the purple, and the blue, to cluster round the top. The upper terrace should be strictly architectural, and no plants are to be harboured there, save such as twine among the balustrades, or fix themselves in the mouldering crevices of the stone. I can endure no plants in pots, — a
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 101
plant in a pot is like a bird in a cage. The gourd alone throws out its vigorous tendrils, and displays its green and golden fruit from the vases that surmount the broad flight of stone steps that lead to the lower terrace ; while a vase of larger dimensions and bolder sculpture at the western corner is backed by the heads of a mass of crimson, rose, and straw-coloured hollyhocks that spring up from the bank below. The lower terrace is twice the width of the one above, of the most velvety turf, laid out in an elaborate pattern of the Italian style. Here are collected the choicest flowers of the garden ; the Dalmatic purple of the gentia- nella, the dazzling scarlet of the verbena, the fulgent lobelia, the bright yellows and rich browns of the calceolaria here luxuriate in their trimly cut parterres, and, with colours as brilliant as the mosaic of an old cathedral painted window,
" broider the ground
With rich inlay." *
But you must leave this mass of gorgeous colouring and the two pretty fountains that play in their basins of native rock, while you descend the flight of steps, simpler than those of the upper terrace, and turn to the left hand, where a broad gravel walk will lead you to the kitchen-garden, through an avenue splendid in autumn with hollyhocks, dahlias, China asters, nasturtians, and African marigolds.
We will stop short of the walled garden to turn among the clipped hedges of box, and yew, and hornbeam which surround the bowling-green, and lead to a curiously formed labyrinth, in the centre of which, perched up on a triangular mound, is a fanciful old summerhouse, with a gilded roof, that commands the view of the whole surrounding country. Quaint devices of all kinds are found here. Here is a sun-
* " Tot fuerant illic, quot habet natura, colores :
Pictaque dissimili flore nitebat humus." — Ov.
102 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
dial of flowers, arranged according to the time of day at which, they open and close. Here are peacocks and lions in livery of Lincoln green. Here are berceaux and arbours, and covered alleys, and enclosures containing the primest of the carnations and cloves in set order, and miniature canals that carry down a stream of pure water to the fish- ponds below. Further onwards, and up the south bank, verging towards the house, are espaliers and standards of the choicest fruit-trees ; here are strawberry-beds raised so as to be easy for gathering ; while the round gooseberry and currant bushes and the arched raspberries continue the formal style up the walls of the enclosed garden, whose outer sides are clothed alternately with fruit and flowers, so that the " stranger within the house" may be satisfied, without being tantalized by the rich reserves within the gate of iron tracery of which the head gardener keeps the key.
Return to the steps of the lower terrace : what a fine slope of green pasture loses itself in the thorn, hazel, and holly thicket below, while the silver thread of the running brook here and there sparkles in the light ; and how happily the miniature prospect, framed by the gnarled branches of those gigantic oaks, discloses the white spire of the village church in the middle distance ! while in the background the smoke, drifting athwart the base of the purple hill, give evidence that the evening fires are just lit in the far-off town.
At the right-hand corner of the lower terrace the ground falls more abruptly away, and the descent into the lawn, which is overlooked from the high western terrace, is by two or three steps at a time, cut out in the native rock of red sandstone, which also forms the base of the terrace itself. Rock plants of every description freely grow in the crevices of the rustic battlement which flanks the path on
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 103
either side ; the irregularity of the structure increases as you descend, till, on arriving on the lawn below, large rude masses lie scattered on the turf and along the foundation of the western terrace.
A profusion of the most exquisite climbing roses of endless variety here clamber up till they bloom over the very balustrades of the higher terrace, or creep over the rough stones at the foot of the descent. Here stretching to the south is the nosegay of the garden. Mignionette, " the Frenchman's darling," and the musk-mimulus spring out of every fissure of the sandstone ; while beds of violets, " That strew the green lap of the new-come spring,"
and lilies of the valley scent the air below. Beds of helio- trope nourish around the isolated blocks of sandstone ; the fuchsia, alone inodorous, claims a place from its elegance ; and honeysuckles and clematis of all kinds trail along the ground, or twine up the stands of rustic baskets, filled with the more choice odoriferous plants of the greenhouse. The scented heath, the tuberose, and the rarer jasmines have each their place, while the sweet-brier and the wall- flower, and the clove and stock gilliflower are not too com- mon to be neglected. To bask upon the dry sunny rock on a bright spring morning in the midst of this " wilder- ness of sweets," or on a dewy summer's eve to lean over the balustrade above, while every breath from beneath wafts up the perfumed air,
" stealing and giving odour,"
is one of the greatest luxuries I have in life.
A little further on the lawn are the trunks and stumps of old pollards hollowed out ; and, from the cavities, filled with rich mould, climbers, creepers, trailers, and twiners of every hue and habit form a singular and picturesque group.
104 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
The lophospermum, the eccrymocarpos, the maurandria, the loasa, the rodokiton, verbenas, and petunias in all their varieties, festoon themselves over the rugged bark, and form the gayest and gracefullest garland imaginable ; while the simple and pretty wall-snapdragon weeps over the side, till its tiny pink threads are tangled among the feathery ferns that fringe the base of the stump.
The lawn now stretches some distance westward, its green and velvet surface uninterrupted by a single shrub (what a space for trap-bat, or " les graces" !) till towards the verge of the shrubberies, into which it falls away, irregular clumps of evergreens and low shrubs break the boundary line of greensward. Here are no borders for flowers, but clusters of the larger and bolder kinds, as hollyhocks and peonies, rise from the turf itself; here too, in spring, golden and purple crocuses, daffodils, aconites, snowdrops, bluebells, cyclamen, wood-anemones, hepaticas, the pink and the blue, chequer the lawn in bold broad strips, the wilder sorts being more distant from the house, and losing themselves under the dark underwood of the adjoining coppice. The ground here becomes more varied and broken ; clumps of double-flowering gorse,
" the vernal furze
With golden baskets hung,"
the evergreen barberry, the ilex in all its varieties, and hardy ferns, bordering the green drive which leads to the wilder part of the plantations. Here, in the words of Bacon, " Trees I would have none in it, but some thicket made only of sweet-brier and honeysuckle, and some wild vine amongst; and the ground set with violets, straw- berries, and primroses, for these are sweet, and prosper in the shade, and these are to be in the heath here and there, not in any order. I like also little heaps, in the nature of
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 105
mole-hills (such as are in wild heaths), to be set with wild thyme."
Another broad drive of greensward dips from the lawn into the darkest and most tangled part of the wood ; here, through a long vista, you catch a glimpse of the American shrubbery below. Rhododendrons, azaleas, calmias, mag- nolias, andromedas, daphnes, heaths, and bog-plants of every species in their genial soil, form a mass of splendid colouring during the spring months, while, even in winter, their dark foliage forms an evergreen mass for the eye to rest upon. Returning again to the lawn, and inclining to the south, you come to an artificial shrubbery, not dotted about in single plants, but in large and bold clusters of the same species, so that the effect from a distance is as good as upon a nearer approach. Here, as elsewhere, not a sod of turf is broken; but, here and there, a bed of gay shrubby plants rises out of the smoothly-shorn grass, and in the background, amid masses of laburnum, lilac, and guelder-rose, fruit-trees of every kind hang their bright garlands in spring, and their mellow produce in autumn. From thence winds a path, the delicise of the garden, planted with such herbs as yield their perfume when trodden upon and crushed, — burnet, wild thyme, and water-mints, according to Bacon's advice, who bids us " set whole alleys of them to have the pleasure when you walk or tread."
It were tedious to follow up the long shady path, not broad enough for more than two, — the " lovers' walk," — and the endless winding tracks in the natural wood, till you burst upon a wild common of
" Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, prickly gorse, and thorns," glowing with heather bloom, and scented with the perfume
106 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
of the furze, just such an English scene as Linnaeus is said to have fallen down and worshipped the first time he beheld it. The heavy dew upon the grass reminds me that we have taken too long a stroll ; and though I could have wished to have shown you my Arboretum, my Thornery, and my Deodara pine, yet the light from the drawingroom windows, which I can see through the trees, calls us homeward, and bids us leave that pleasure for another day, — and hark ! — the strain of music and " the voice of girls !" Listen ! they sing
«* I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine."
To enjoy our garden, however, we want no such expanse as I have just described. The Spitalfields weaver may derive more pleasure from his green box of smoked auri- culas than the Duke of Devonshire from his two acres of conservatory at Chatsworth. Nor if we can tell a foxglove and a corn-flower when we see them, need we be as wise as Solomon, who " spoke of plants from the cedar that is in Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall." If we have a good rose-bush on our lawn, we need not torture ourselves to discover that philosopher's-stone of gardening — a blue dahlia.
Some love for flowers, however, we should have, if Cicero, and Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Temple, and Addison, and Scott, be of any authority with us at all. Some care of these things we must have, for One far higher than all has bid us " behold the fig-tree and all the trees," and " consider the lilies of the field." A garden is inwoven in the noblest and most sacred feelings of man's heart. This world, in man's innocence, was a garden, and it was
THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 107
there that God walked and communed with his creatures. It was to a garden that in his agony our Lord retired. The very word Paradise is only another name for bliss ; and it may be doubted whether it gains this signification so much from our first parents dwelling there before sin and sorrow were known, as from the natural feelings of all nations and creeds to connect the happiness of a future state inseparably with that of a boundless expanse of trees, and fruits, and flowers. The shade of Achilles is described by Homer as retiring over a mead of asphodels
" KO.T ct<r</)o5eAoj/ Acijuwi/o ; "
and Virgil knew how to contrast the adamantine walls and iron-bound towers of the guilty, with th,e flowery lawns of
the blessed :
" amoena vireta Fortunatorum nemorum ;"
and Addison, in his Vision of Mirza, had no better way of describing the seats of bliss than as " islets floating in a sunny sea, covered with fruits and flowers."
What indeed were the Elysian fields, and the Happy isles, and the gardens of the Hesperides, but so many in- corporations of the highest and loftiest flights of man's imaginations and desires, — the realizations of the intensest yearnings of the soul after a higher and more glorious state of existence, — and which always made a garden the scene of that better and more abiding happiness ?
Of all the secondary occupations and pursuits of this life, the Garden is the only one we can hope to follow out in the world which is to come. Simple and pure as any other of our enjoyments may be, the best of them are too artificial and too gross to give us the least hope of our ever meeting them again. Even our books, which we have, loved as friends — which we have pored over through the
108 THE FLOWER GARDEN.
long summer days till twilight dimmed our eyes, or hugged in our arm-chairs over the huge winter fire — that we have viewed with such complacency glittering in their gay eoats along our study wall — they must moulder like their master — doomed, like him, to be the sport of worms. The precious imprints of Aldus and the gorgeous tooling of Grolier are of the earth, earthy. Our prints, our pictures, and our statues, all our most laboured effigies of ideal beauty, will be as nothing, when the fleeting idea we have endeavoured to embody shall itself be realized, and when we shall cast away all our paltry imitations as " childish things." But our flowers, dear flowers, our trees, our gardens, shall remain. The new earth will be a second Eden, and Paradise and innocence shall be restored. Then shall the feathery palm-tree and lowly snow-drop flourish in the same clime. The wilderness will bloom with the rose of Sharon ; the upas will forget its poison ; the nettle will be stingless, and " without thorn the rose ;" the mango and the guava will ripen under the same sky that will allow the eglantine to bind their branches. And this is no idle dream or heathen myth. What may be fancy to others, to the Christian will be faith. He alone can certainly look for- ward, in " the new heavens and the new earth," to that time when " the mountains and hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle-tree ; the wilderness, and the solitary place shall be glad for them ; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose."
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