1

o

CQ

IN-MY-VICARAGE

GARDEN-AND •

CANON • •
ELLACOMBE

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

IN MY VICARAGE GARDEN
AND ELSEWHERE

BY THE SAME A UTHOR

IN A GLOUCESTERSHIRE GARDEN
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE

IN MY VICARAGE

GARDEN AND

ELSEWHERE

BY

REV. HENRY N. ELLACOMBE, M.A.

VICAR OF BITTON, GLOUCESTERSHIRE

" I MADE ME GARDENS AND ORCHARDS,
AND I PLANTED TREES IN THEM OF ALL

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON & NEW YORK MDCCCCII

Printed by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh

PREFACE

THIS little volume may be considered a sequel
to my former book, " In a Gloucestershire
Garden." All the chapters in it have already
appeared as occasional papers in the Guardian,
Pilot, and Gardeners Magazine, and I have to
thank the proprietors of those papers for their
courteous permission to publish the papers in
book-form.

HENRY N. ELLACOMBE.

BITTON VICARAGE,

November 1901.

M3G8231

Contents

PART I.— IN MY VICARAGE GARDEN

I. THE FLOWERS OF EARLY SPRING . . i

II. FLOWERS OF LATE SPRING . .10

III. FLOWERS OF SUMMER ... 19

IV. FLOWERS OF AUTUMN . 28
V. THE MIXED GARDEN . 38

VI. A BACKWARD SPRING . 46

PART II.— ELSEWHERE— VARIOUS

VII. SUNSHINE AND SHADE IN THE GARDEN . 59

VIII. CARPET PLANTS . . . .66

IX. THE GARDEN UNDER SNOW . . 72

X. THE ROCK GARDEN . . . .81

XI. YORK AND LANCASTER ROSES . . 91

XII. PLANT NAMES . . 98

XIII. THE SCENTS OF FLOWERS . . .108

XIV. MEDICAL PROPERTIES OF FLOWERS . 120
XV. RAILWAY GARDENS . . . .133

XVI. OUR NATIONAL GARDENS . . .145
vii

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

XVII. FLORA OF ENGLAND 1800 YEARS AGO . 160

PART III.— ELSEWHERE— SWITZERLAND AND
SHAKESPEARE

XVIII. IN WILD Swiss GARDENS . . 177

XIX. PIORA ..... 189

XX. SHAKESPEARE AND ARCHITECTURE . 206

v

PART I

IN MY VICARAGE GARDEN
CHAPTER I

THE FLOWERS OF EARLY SPRING

WHEN does spring commence ? And at what
exact time of year may we look for our spring
flowers?. By most people the answer would be
readily given that spring commences with April,
or it may be a few weeks earlier in forward
localities ; and that spring flowers are those that
may be looked for in March, April, and May.
But the thoughtful gardener may give a different
answer ; and I am inclined to look for the right
answer in Bacon's happy phrase when describing
his ideal garden, in which he would have Ver
perpetuum. To the real lover of plants, spring
lasts from the first of January to the thirty-first of
December, and spring flowers are to be 'found all
through the year. To put it in another way,
spring is the time at which flowers wake out of
their sleep, and the awakening takes place, not
according to months, or even to weather, but
according to the needs and nature of each different

A I

In My Vicarage Garden

plant. And if we take this interpretation we may
begin our spring for garden purposes with the New
Year ; and if we are to have Ver perpetuum that
must be the commencement of our gardening year ;
and whether the weather is mild or cold the
gardener will see signs of the commencement of
spring even in what we usually call the depth of
winter. I have but a poor opinion of a gardener
who is only a summer or fine-weather gardener ;
and I do not call him a true lover of plants who
can only see beauty in fully developed flowers ;
and that must be a poor garden which cannot
show a plant-lover much to interest him in the
shortest days ; and the gardener, whether master
or servant, must be a poor observer if he cannot
see growth and progress in what is too often
called the dead time of the garden. The garden
is never dead ; growth is always going on, and
growth that can be seen, and seen with delight.
Take this year's January (1900). During Decem-
ber there were several days of very great cold,
which checked growth, and cut down many things
that had survived up to that time. Yet, on the
New Year, the garden was full of interest, and
even beauty, for any one who knew how to look
for it. True, there were very few open flowers,
but there were some which were very precious.
There were early crocuses, such as C. Imperati
and stellaris, and Christmas roses, but, as I said
before, the interest of a garden is not limited to
flowers. It is- really astonishing how little the

The Flowers of Early Spring

majority of people seem to appreciate the value
and beauty of green foliage, especially in winter.
In some gardens it is the custom to fill the empty
beds, which were in summer given to bedding
plants, with small evergreen shrubs. The effect
is seldom satisfactory ; the poor little things can-
not throw off the miserable appearance which
marks them as the damnosa hereditas of summer
bedding, and they can give no pleasure to any
true lover of plants. But there are many
perennial plants which will clothe the surface of
the ground as well in winter as in summer, and
can be allowed to occupy the ground the whole
year without injuring any plants that the gardener
may wish to use for the summer decoration of his
garden. The hardy cyclamens are most useful in
this way. The Neapolitan cyclamen flowers in
late autumn, and is at once furnished with most
beautiful large mottled leaves, which lie flat on
the ground, and remain in full beauty till April or
May. The C. Coum forms its leaves a little later,
and before the flowers, but it, too, forms a beautiful
carpet of close-lying foliage, and, where the soil is
favourable, they will increase rapidly, and may be
let alone for years. I have some large patches
which I know to have been over eighty years in
the same place, and they seem to me to increase
in beauty every year, and there are few plants
which multiply themselves so readily by seed.
The stalk, immediately after flowering, twists
itself and bends towards the ground, in which the

3

In My Vicarage Garden

seed-vessel, still unripe, buries itself, and the seed
germinates so rapidly that I have often found
young bulbils fully formed and fit to handle and
remove within six weeks of their flowering, the
bulbils being snugly covered with one or two
inches of soil. Ants and worms are said to be
active agents in carrying the seeds of some
cyclamens, but I do not know if they do so with
these two species. Another plant which will
cover the ground closely, especially in dense
shade, is the Asarum Europeum, and it will even
produce its curious, though inconspicuous, flowers
in the depth of winter. There are many other
good carpet plants which show their beauty
almost more in winter than in summer ; but to
speak of all carpet plants would require a separate
article, and I want to speak of flowers.

I suppose, if anyone was asked to name the
special flowers of January he would name the
Christmas rose, the crocus, the snowdrop, and the
winter aconite. They are all undisputed beauties,
and much could be said of each ; but I must
dismiss the Christmas rose and the aconite with
only one remark, that, different as they are, they are
very closely allied, and, almost alone among flowers,
their many petals are like little twisted spills,
and soon fall off; and in both the beauty of the
flower isdn the sepals, and not in the petals ; and
in both the flower is formed beneath the surface
of the soil, and the stem forces itself through in
the shape of an arch, bringing the full-formed

4

The Flowers of Early Spring

flowerbud after it. But of the crocus and snow-
drop I must say more ; and when one begins to
speak of the crocus and snowdrop, it is hard to
know when to stop. The snowdrop grows in
many parts of Europe, and certainly grows in
Italy, Sicily, and Greece ; yet, in spite of its
beauty and its being so conspicuous by the time
of its flowering, there are no notices of it in Virgil,
Theocritus, or Theophrastus. It may be the,
\Mx67ov of Theophrastus and of the Anthologia
Graeca, but this is uncertain. It is not to be
wondered at that it is unnoticed by all our earlier
poets, for it is certainly not a native, and was not
even known as a garden plant till well into the
seventeenth century. This is quite certain from
its being unnamed by Bacon in his account of the
flowers for the early months of the year ; it is not
mentioned by Gerard in 1577, but it is by his
editor, Johnson, in 1636 ; Parkinson did not have
it in 1629, but he had in 1656. It is the same
with the foreign gardeners — Clusius knew it ; but
it is not in Laurembergius' excellent little book,
"De Plantis Bulbosis " (1631); nor does it find
a place in that most delightful of all old books on
gardening, the " Hortus Floridus " of Crispin de
Pas, published in 1614. It is very much the
same with the pretty name. Whoever invented
the name of snowdrop — i.e. earrings of snow —
deserved a lasting record ; but no one can trace
him. Johnson, in 1636, says that "some call
them also snowdrops " — and so the name was

5

In My Vicarage Garden

creeping in ; but it does not seem to have become
popular soon, probably because the plant had not
become common ; but Boyle uses the name in
1663 ; and Evelyn in 1664, in the " Kalendarium
Hortense," names among the " flowers in prime "
in December, " snow-flowers or drops." And in
connection with what I said above of Bacon's Ver
perpetuum, it is interesting to note that under this
month Evelyn says that so "it is that a Royal
Garden or Plantation may be contrived according
to my Lord Verulam's design " ; and, I may add,
that he begins his account of the gardener's work
by saying that " the gardener's work is never at
an end ; it begins with the year and continues to
the next." The snowdrop is now one of our
commonest garden plants, and the name is
universal, and perhaps no plant is so popular with
all from childhood to old age ; though it is not
granted to all to see in the mixture of colours,
pure white, green, and a clear gold below all,
purity with an undercurrent of passion, as Forbes
Watson and Christina Rossetti were able to see
in them. But then we are not all able, as they
were, to see moral qualities of the highest or the
lowest order in our flowers, or to read our own
thoughts into them.

I must not trust myself with the crocuses — the
subject is too large. The names alone, crocus
and saffron, are a study, and fill many pages of
appendix in that masterly account of the family,
" The Genus Crocus," by G. Maw, the best plant

6

The Flowers of Early Spring

monograph in the English language. But it is
with the crocus as with the snowdrop. The
headquarters of the family are in Greece and in
Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, yet very little
notice of it is taken by Greek or Roman writers ;
and the early English writers have little to say of
it, except for the medical and culinary virtues of
saffron. But I know of few flowers that will
better repay close attention than the crocus.
There are many distinct species, and for any one
wishing for a simple introduction to botany, the
crocus is a very good plant to study, especially
because the parts of the plants are so easily
examined, and though to most people all crocuses
are alike except in colour, the botanical differ-
ences between the species are well-marked and
interesting.

Besides these humble plants there are many
good shrubs in flower in January. The beautiful
evergreen Clematis cirrhosa may be classed as a
shrub, and in a mild January is often covered
with its delicate spotted flowers ; but it is a
southern plant, and the flowers cannot stand much
frost. There is the curious Garrya elliptica from
North America, which, when covered with its long
catkins, looking like a lot of small handbells
strung together one over the other, is quite an
ornamental shrub, and is so unlike any other
plant that for many years it was put into a
separate family all by itself. There are the two
wonderfully-scented shrubs, the Chimonanthus

7

In My Vicarage Garden

fragrans and Lonicera fragrantissima, with which
.may be joined on account of its scent the weedy,
sweet-scented coltsfoot, with the scent of the
heliotrope ; while for beauty of flower few shrubs
at any time of year can surpass the gorse and the
Laurustinus. The winter-flowering gorse is the
dwarf species U. nanus, very abundant in many
parts, but local, and in flower sometimes very
abundantly all through the winter from October
to March. The Laurustinus, in spite of its name,
is no laurel, but is a very near relation of our
Guelder rose. It is the special ornament of the
Spanish and Portuguese hillsides, and with us
must be reckoned among the very best of the
flowering shrubs where it will grow well, but it
seldom does well in soil charged with lime ; it
will live there, but both in growth and flower is
very inferior to those grown on the sandstone
formations.

An American writer justly reckons among the
pleasures of the winter garden that it is so
instructive. In spring, summer and autumn the
garden may be said to take care of itself, but
" the winter garden," he says, " is never finished.
One gains every season some new plant to be put
on trial, and is pleased if every year it shows
some slight gain." And what I have said is
enough to show that even in December and
January the garden is not, or need not be, all
barren. Yet the gardener is always glad when
December and January are past. He seems to

8

The Flowers of Early Spring

have got through the worst part of the winter, and
February is altogether a delightful month in the
garden. Of course, he may have frosts, even
destructive frosts ; but frosts are not altogether
bad either for the garden or the gardener. I am
quite sure that for English gardens what Coleridge
calls " the secret ministry of frost," is a ministry
that cannot be spared ; and for the gardener it
is a ministry that teaches patience and watchful
carefulness. " Gaudet patientia duris," says
Lucretius ; and he is but a foolish gardener who
is always expecting losses instead of hoping for
successes. The losses may come, to some extent
they certainly will come, but the advice of the
elder brother in " Comus " is the truer wisdom —

" Brother, be not over exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils ;
For grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid ?
Or if they be but false alarms of fear,
How bitter is such self-delusion ! "

CHAPTER II

FLOWERS OF LATE SPRING

THE first four months of this year were to the
gardener four months of anxiety, and, to some
extent, of disappointment. After the long, dry,
hot summer, followed by abundance of rain in the
late autumn, there was good reason to .expect an
early, perhaps an abnormally early, outburst of
spring flowers, and so there doubtless would have
been but for the frosts in December. They were
not very severe, and did not last long, but they
were sufficiently severe to alter all the prospects
of an early spring. It was really quite surprising
how great a change was brought about by even
those few days of severe frosts. Instead of an
early outburst of flowers we had an unusually late
one, and the proofs of this were seen in every part
of the garden. In 1898-9 I was able to pick an
abundance of flowers of the sweet Chimonanthus
fragrans to send away for the Christmas and New
Year, and I know of few more acceptable Christmas
presents to friends who have no gardens than a few
of these deliciously scented little flowers. There is
no special beauty in the pale yellow flowers striped
with purple, but when placed in a saucer with a
little water a few will perfume a room for weeks.

10

Flowers of Late Spring

It is a shrub that should be in every garden, but
it requires a wall. It is one of the most difficult
of shrubs to propagate by cuttings or layers ; but
it sometimes produces its curious seed vessels,
looking like brown broad beans, and the seeds
come up readily. This year, instead of being
able to send them away in December and
January, I could find none fit for picking before
February. It was the same with the beautiful
Iris Stylosa, from which in 1898-9 I could pick
good flowers at Christmas and the New Year ;
but this year I could pick none before February,
when they were most abundant. I wonder this
most beautiful plant is not grown everywhere. It
is not a rare plant, and can be got in quantity at
a very cheap rate ; yet I seldom see it except in
gardens that have a fairly large collection of plants.
There are many varieties, all beautiful ; but one,
to my mind, stands above all, a very rich deep
blue with broad petals ; I believe it has some
special name which I do not know.

Altogether it was a late season ; and it showed
itself to be so in many ways. In 1899 Easter
was a week earlier than this year, yet for the
Easter decorations of 1899 it was very difficult to
get daffodils in any quantity ; in some.parts they
were quite over. This year it seemed at one time
very doubtful whether they could be had at all ;
they did not " take the winds of March with
beauty/' and just before Easter the milder weather
and bright sun brought them all out at once, but

ii

In My Vicarage Garden

they did not last very long. It was natural to
suppose that this short life of the flowers was owing
to the powerful sunshine that we had at that time ;
but I cannot help thinking that, though the flowers
did not open, the work which the flower has to do
was not altogether delayed, and that the formation
of seed was to some extent going on, so that
when the flowers fully expanded their work was
half done, and there was nothing left to be done
by them but the finishing the work and then
passing away. It is known that this is the case
with the high Alpines ; their work of perfecting
their seeds must be finished before a given time :
and if owing to a late melting of the snow the
flowers are late, yet the seeds are not proportionally
late, and are perfected in good time. I do not
say that this is the case with all high Alpines, but
it certainly is with some ; and I have little doubt
that it is so with many other plants and was so
with the narcissi this year. There is no need to
recommend daffodils to English gardeners ; they
are everybody's flowers, and have been so for
generations ; but I suppose they were never grown
to the extent they are now. And for those who
like to study their history there is much interest.
It is very doubtful whether our daffodils are the
narcissus of Homer and Theocritus ; they may be,
and it is pleasant to think that they are ; and
if they knew the plant at all it is probable that
they knew the Tazetta daffodils. Theophrastus
describes a narcissus, but as it had green flowers

12

Flowers of Late Spring

and flowered in September, it cannot be any of
our daffodils. If the flower was as abundant in
the South of Europe in former times as it is now,
it is very surprising that so little notice is taken
of it by Latin writers. Virgil names it, but as
he describes it as sera comantem, it must be very
doubtful whether it can be our favourite flower ;
but Pliny's description of it as " a white flower
with a purple cup or bell within" seems to point
to the poet's narcissus ; and it is worth noting
that he discarded the fable of the connection of
the flower with the boy Narcissus, for " it took
the name in Greek Narcessus, of Narce, which
betokeneth numbednesse or dumbnesse of sense
and not of the young boy Narcissus as the poets
doe faine and fable." But I must leave the
narcissus, for there is no limit to its interest,
and it needs no words of mine to spread its
praises.

The tulips behaved this year very like the
narcissus. They delayed their time of blooming
till the weather was genial, and then they all
burst into beauty at once. I suppose more has
been written about the tulip than about any other
bulbous plant, and of late years the number of
known species has been largely increased from
Eastern and Central Asia and Asia Minor. Though
we have a very beautiful native tulip, the cultiva-
tion of the tulip as a garden flower does not seem
to have commenced much before the latter part
of the seventeenth century. Bacon mentions an

In My Vicarage Garden

early tulip flowering in January and February,
and I do not know what he meant by it ; the
others he places in April. Evelyn also mentions
" precoce tulips " as in flower in January. I need
not say anything of the rapid rise of the flower
into popular favour till it culminated in the tulip
mania ; but though the flower has never entirely
gone out of fashion, it has had more ups and
downs than most flowers. Van Oosten, a Dutch
gardener, who published an excellent English book
on gardening in 1703, after giving his opinion that
the art of gardening could go no further than the
tulips which he produced, refused to tell the secret
of his cultivation, because " it is a madness to give
laurels to an ass who deserveth only nettles " ;
and he says that, " having been the most beloved
object of princes, they are at last become the
subject of the scorn of men." There is complete
evidence that the name was given by Gesren
from the Turkish Cap, and the name, with slight
changes, has been adopted in most of the countries
of Europe.

I am not now giving a complete list of the
many beautiful flowers that brighten our English
springtide ; I am only picking a few here and
there, and among the chief ornaments of spring
I reckon the flowering shrubs. This year the
shrubs have been clothed with a beauty that few
of us have ever seen before. The laurustinuses
were sheets of white, but they did not like the
cold winds of March and April. The different

14

Flowers of Late Spring

forms of the Pyrus japonica were covered with
flowers and defied the winds, and so lasted in
flower a long time ; Photinia serrulata has a
special beauty of its own in its young shoots,
which at a very short distance look like fine
flowers ; but this year my tree had flowers for
the first time, though the tree must be quite fifty
years old ; the flowers are pretty, but not striking.
The Forsythias were all beautiful, but with us the
F. suspensa grown against the house was far the
best, and was like a golden curtain at least fifteen
feet high. After flowering the whole plant is cut
in close, and at once begins to form the new
shoots that will bear flowers next year. All the
magnolias have been loaded with flowers, and
surely no other hardy flowering tree can bear
comparison with these early flowering magnolias,
except perhaps the horse chestnut. And, to name
no more, the pretty Azara microphylla, with its
dainty foliage, had the backs of the leaves
covered with its little flowers ; the flowers are of
small beauty, but they have a strong Vanilla-like
scent which can be felt many yards away.

I think the spring of 1900 will be memorable
in many ways in the garden. I cannot remember
a season in which flowers were so abundant on
almost every flower-bearing plant — not, however,
on all, for the crown imperials in my own garden
and in most of the gardens in the neighbourhood
were stunted in growth and had very few flowers.
Why this grand old plant should this year be

J5

In My Vicarage Garden

an exception to almost every other plant, whether
tree, bulb, or herbaceous, is a puzzle which I
cannot solve. The fruit trees were all as full of
flower as they can well carry, and there is a
promise of an abundance of fruit of all sorts. The
plum-trees were a wonderful sight, as they all
burst into flower at once, soon after Easter ; and
where the orchard was surrounded by a hedge of
their near relation or ancestor, the blackthorn, the
beauty was much increased. The blackthorn
brought with it the usual " blackthorn winter,"
but it was short and not severe enough to do
harm. The season also introduced me to a
beauty in tree life which was quite new to me.
We have very few wild birches in Gloucestershire ;
but I was in Surrey just after Easter, and was
surprised to see the birches apparently surrounded
with a pale golden mist that I had never noticed
before. The apparent mist was produced by the
catkins which generally come out with, or even
after the leaves ; this year they came out first,
and so their beauty was not hidden. Another
very marked feature in the garden this year is in
the seeds. All sown seeds have done wonderfully,
whether sown in pots and raised by heat, or sown
in the open ground. This naturally comes from
the dry sunny summer of 1 899, which fully ripened
all seeds. And it was most apparent in the number
of self-sown seedlings that have shown themselves,
in many cases for the first time. I never before
had the pleasure of seeing self-sown seedlings of

16

Flowers of Late Spring

the grand Eryngium Alpinum coming up by the
side of the parent plant ; nor have I ever before
been troubled with seedlings of the globe thistle ;
this year I have had to hoe down a large patch
of them ; and I have not till last year known the
Japanese Kohlreuteria even ripen its seeds, but it
did so last autumn, and dropped them on the
ground, on which they lay exposed all the winter,
and there are now scores of young plants showing
themselves. And so these different points of
interest in this spring, the abundance of flowers,
the extreme strength and vigour of almost all
vegetable growth, and the full ripening and ready
germination of seeds show that the beauty of any
season does not depend on the weather of the
moment ; the beauty has been laid up and been
matured for us by the weather of many previous
months — it may be of many previous years.

I cannot close without a short record of the
wild flowers of this spring ; they were really
wonderful. 1 have mentioned the blackthorn,
which in some parts divided the fields with lines
of silver, but in the fields there was such a glory of
dandelions, buttercups, and celandine, that one
felt ashamed to call them weeds. Primroses and
cowslips were unusually abundant and 'fine, and
so were the wood anemones and bluebells, and I
never remember such an abundance of the flowers
of the wild oxalis, which I think one of the most
graceful of our wild plants ; but the flowers are
very often much hidden by the leaves. If it were
B 17

In My Vicarage Garden

not a British weed, we should certainly grow it
on our rockwork as a special beauty ; it soon
becomes troublesome there, but I admit the rose-
coloured form as quite a little gem. Not only in
England, but also in Spain and Portugal this
little wood flower is called Alleluia, and it is no
strained interpretation that the name was given
from a strong religious feeling that the humblest
herb or flower declares the glory of God and
showeth His handiwork, as well as the heavens and
the firmament. If we can learn this lesson from
our spring flowers our love and admiration for
them will not be wasted.

18

CHAPTER III

FLOWERS OF SUMMER

THE season of summer, meaning especially the
months of June, July and August, is to every
gardener the most enjoyable of the four seasons.
It is the season to which he has been looking
forward in all the different processes of cultivation ;
it is the season of enjoyment ; the season in which,
with a few occasional drawbacks from bad seasons,
or it may be from wrong cultivation, anxious
preparation ends in success ; the season of hopes
now ended in the reality of sight, when we need
no longer hope for that we see not, and with
patience wait for it, but may feast our eyes on
the beauties which we have waited for, and to
some extent have created, and in which we cheer
ourselves with the delightful feeling that our
labours have not been in vain, and so we will go
on the next year as cheerfully and as hopefully
as ever. For I hold it as a firm article of faith
in gardening that there has never been in any
year what can be called complete failure ; there
are, of course, failures and disappointments in some
parts of the garden, but there have been unlooked-
for successes in some other parts, and on the
whole the compensation has been great enough to

19

In My Vicarage Garden

stop all grumbling. But in this particular year
(1900) there has been little or no cause for
grumbling, because the failures have been so few,
while the successes have been so many. I suppose
the oldest among us cannot recollect a year in
which there has been such a marvellous abundance
of flowers, such healthy growth, and such richness
of colour in the flowers, and such a delightful
season in which to enjoy it all. It has been so
all the year. I noted it in what I said of the
flowers of spring, and the flowers of summer have
carried on the story. The fruit trees were beauti-
ful pictures, with scarcely an exception — beginning
with the plums, the pears, apples, cherries, and all
the wall fruits were so laden with flowers that if
the fruit had been in proportion to the flowers the
crops would have been almost too much for the
trees ; but in this part of the country many of
the flowers were abortive, and so the crops, though
probably above the average, are less than many
looked for.

Then came the roses, and they surpassed them-
selves. In my own garden I have never seen
such a display of the beautiful rich yellow R.
hemisphcerica, a rose of which I am very fond, not
only for its beauty, but also for its long history
and many associations ; for it is one of the oldest
roses in cultivation. It is true that it very seldom
shows its full beauty, for it forms its flowers very
early and they are apt to be injured by late frosts,
or even by cold nights some degrees above

20

Flowers of Summer

freezing, and it never fully opens its flowers ; but
even in its hemispherical state it is very beautiful
both in shape and colour ; and on one of my
bushes, grown against a wall, I must have had
nearly two hundred blooms, more or less open at
the same time — really a grand sight. It was very
much the same with all the roses ; they were very
abundant, very full-coloured, and very clean, and
the dry sunny July has produced an unusual effect
among the single roses. They are laden with
their handsome fruit (hips) at least a month or
even six weeks before the usual time, so that we
have this year the beauty of their fruit (which I
consider a very great, and, in some species, perhaps
even the chief beauty) for a month or six weeks
longer than usual. But while the garden roses
were so beautiful, I noted that among the wild
roses the case was quite different. I cannot say
why it should be so, but the absence of our
beautiful wild roses in the hedgerows was very
marked. I was in Tyrol, chiefly among the
Dolomites, during July, and the roses were very
few, and those few very deficient in flowers.
Among the herbaceous plants, the effects of the
fine weather of 1 899 were seen everywhere. Lark-
spurs were very grand, and even such moisture-
loving plants as the phloxes were quite happy
in spite of the drought. The fine summer and
autumn of 1899 had given them such vigour that
they were able to hold their own in the drought
of June and July, and both in size and colour

21

In My Vicarage Garden

they were excellent It would be too long to go
through many more of the herbaceous plants ; it
is enough to say that, with scarcely an exception,
they were all so vigorous that the record of their
beauty in the summer of 1900 will be a lasting
memory to every gardener.

I must go to the shrubs, for it was in the
shrubs especially that the long heat of the
summer of 1899 produced such wonderful effects
in the summer of 1900. Wistarias, both white
and blue, almost recalled the pictures that we
have seen of them as grown in the gardens of
Japan, where they are especial favourites ; but I
was surprised that none of them produced fruit.
I have never seen the fruit of the blue Wistaria,
but last year my white one had a great many of
its pretty bean-like fruits ; this year there were
none, though the flowers were abundant, and
looked so healthy that in such a summer I
naturally looked for a crop of fruit. The
Catalpas were everywhere loaded with flowers,
but in my own garden the beauty both of leaves
and flowers was much marred by the strong
gales in the beginning of August. The Christ's
thorn (Paliurus) was a sheet of pale gold, and
was, I think, more beautiful in my own garden
than where I saw it in its wild habitats in North
Italy ; it is a plant that I admire for its beauty as
much as for its historical interest, and I wonder
it is not more frequently to be seen in English
gardens. But if I were to pick out the shrub

22

Flowers of Summer

that has more especially distinguished itself this
summer, I should pick out the Rhus cotinus. It
is one of the Sumach trees, and is known as the
Venice or Varnish Sumach, and is found in many
parts of Southern Europe, and may be seen in
great abundance on some of the hills round the
Italian lakes. Pliny says it is found on the
Apennines, and is used for wood inlaying ; and it
is from him that we have got the two Latin
names, while Sumach is from the Arabic. The
great beauty of the tree is in its flowering, if,
indeed, that can be called flowering where there
are no true flowers. The whole shrub is covered
with large panicles of abortive flowering stems, in
which the true flowers are entirely absent, and
nothing remains but the stems. Yet those
bundles of flower stems form the most beautiful
vegetable feathers, resembling marabout feathers.
It is from this wig-like appearance of the tree
that it has its French name of Arbre de perruque,
and its English name of Smoke Tree. There are
two varieties : in the wild form, and in the form
usually seen in gardens, the panicles are a dull
whitish green, but the far more beautiful form has
the panicles a rich rose colour, and this variety is,
I think, the most beautiful of shrubs, and as it
keeps its beauty for several weeks it is a shrub
that all ought to grow. Whoever does grow the
shrub should make a point of carefully studying
its structure ; and he or she will find much
interest in it, and will thank me for drawing

23

In My Vicarage Garden

attention to it. For it is absolutely unique in the
plant world, with the exception of its near relation
the North American R. cotinoides, a plant which I
strongly recommend for the beauty of its foliage
in spring and autumn, but I have not seen the
flower. The peculiarity of the structure is that
the flower stalks which form the panicle are
perfectly smooth when first formed, and remain
smooth if they bear flowers ; but if, as is usually
the case, they bear no flowers, the stems are
covered with rigid hairs which add to and even
form the wigginess of the shrub ; and though
botanists have tried to explain the connection
between these two peculiar characters of the tree,
they remain unexplained and are absolutely
unique. There are, we know, many plants which
by cultivation have had their flowers converted
into what we should call more useful parts ; and
there are some which man uses before the flowers
are formed, such as the caper, the clove, the
cauliflower, the pineapple, and others, but all
these have been purposely changed by man ; in
the wig or smoke tree the work is all nature's.

Coming to bulbs, and speaking of them very
shortly, it has certainly been a good year for lilies.
My own garden is not very favourable to lilies, but I
had some very good ones this year, especially some
of the North American lilies, also the martagons,and
the fine South European L. pomponium ; and the
Madonna lily, which is at once the most beautiful
and the most capricious of all, has this year,

24

Flowers of Summer

wherever I saw it, been very beautiful and free
from disease. For this again, no doubt, we have
to thank the long hot summer of 1899, which
thoroughly roasted the bulbs, and so made them
strong and able to fight against their many
enemies.

Another tribe that has been in great vigour
this summer is the grass tribe, the Graminea.
The Arundo donax, or false bamboo of Southern
Europe, has reached a height this year beyond all
former years, both in the green and in the varie-
gated state, and it is the same with the bamboos.
Like many other plants this year, they started
very late ; some of them gave no sign of new
shoots till the rains of the latter part of July
came. For this they waited patiently, and when
it came their growth was wonderful. I have a
good plant of the Phyllostachys Castillonis, which,
with its alternatives of green and gold in the
stems, I consider the best of all the hardy
bamboos. It is considered a little tender, but
it has lived with me many years. Last winter
many of the stems died, and though I knew the
plant was alive and healthy I was beginning to
think that it might not send up new shoots this
year ; but after the rain it started into full growth,
and in less than one week it has sent up splendid
shoots, some over ten feet in length, which will
probably be fifteen feet or more before it stops
growing.

The richness of the foliage of all plants, whether
25

In My Vicarage Garden

herbaceous, or trees or shrubs, deserves a passing
notice. In spite of the drought in June and July,
the freshness of the foliage everywhere has been a
thing to notice and rejoice in. But I do not want
to dismiss the garden without saying something of
the weeds, which form so large a feature in many
gardens. If we have a fine season for the garden
we must expect plenty of weeds ; it is part of the
price we pay for it ; for the weather that is good
for our choice flowers and vegetables is as good
for the weeds. I am one of those who think that
weeds in a garden are, within a certain- limit, not
altogether an unmixed evil ; and certainly I would
rather see a flower border with a mixture of flower-
ing weeds than with a few plants and large con-
tinents of bare soil. But in a well-kept garden
weeds have no place, and when the garden is not
surrounded with fields there should be little
difficulty in keeping them at bay, even with a
small staff of gardeners ; where it is surrounded
by fields it becomes almost impossible. But it
can be done, and I will finish my paper with one
useful hint on the subject. I should class the
plantain as the worst of all weeds, especially to a
good lawn. There are many plans for destroying
it, such as specially made spuds, instruments for
inserting sulphuric acid or other poison into the
plants, etc., and none of them succeed completely.
But a complete remedy can be found in common
table salt. Place a piece about the size of a hazel
nut on the very middle of the plant in hot, dry

26

Flowers of Summer

weather. Don't spread it, and don't make a hole
in the plant, but leave the salt on it, and in two or
three days the leaves will blacken, and the root
will so completely perish that I have known a hole
left in the grass of two or three inches diameter.
This soon fills up, and the plant will not appear
again. Experto crede. A very few years ago I
had large carpets of plantain on my lawn ; they
are all gone, and in their place are carpets of rich
turf. If any of my readers tries the experiment,
I hope he may be as successful as I have been.

27

CHAPTER IV

FLOWERS OF AUTUMN

THE general idea of autumn is that it is the
season of decay, and the passing away of the
beauty of the garden. I do not think so ; I
prefer to look on autumn as the season of full
maturity, the time of year when the life of the
plant reaches its full perfection. To the real
student of plant life the sleep of winter, the
resurrection of spring, the full-blown flowers of
summer are only so many steps towards the final
stage of the ripened fruit, which is the great point
at which all plants gradually arrive, and which is
really the true object of their existence ; and it is
not till the final point has been reached and
passed that real decay sets in. Looking at our
garden with this mind the autumn is not a time
of sadness ; it may even be a time of rejoicing at
the fulness of life which autumn shows, and more
than that, a rejoicing in a fulness of beauty.1

For a fine autumn is a time of great beauty,
and it is certainly not a time when our gardens
are bare ; there are still a vast number of beautiful
flowers to be seen which will bear comparison

1 Pulchrorum Autumnus Pukherrinus. — BACON, Of Beauty.
28

Flowers of Autumn

with the flowers of midsummer. Putting aside
such flowers as dahlias, China asters, chrysanthe-
mums, and other tender plants which yet add
much to the gaiety of the garden in autumn,
there are good hardy herbaceous plants and
shrubs which give brightness to the garden till
the frost comes. Chief among these are the
different species of perennial sunflowers (helian-
thus) and the asters or Michaelmas daisies.
Asters are found in almost all cold and tem-
perate countries ; one species, the Marsh Aster
(A. tripolium] being found in England all round
the coast, but delighting chiefly in the salt-
marshes of the estuaries : the flower is a poor one,
and the plants scarcely deserve being brought into
the garden. But there are two in Europe which
may be reckoned among the best of the family,
the dwarf A. Alpinus, so well known to all
travellers in Switzerland, and the A. amellus, a
native of many parts of Southern Europe, in-
cluding Switzerland. There seems no reason to
doubt that this is the Amellus minutely described
by Virgil : —

Aureus ipse ; sed in foliis quae plarima circum
Funduntur, violae sublucet purpura nigrae.

GEORG. IV. 271.

where the ipse is the central disk, and foliis the
petals or ray. This aster is with me the earliest
to flower, and the most beautiful, and more than
any other flower it is a great attraction to butter-

29

In My Vicarage Garden

flies and moths ; this year it was crowded with
Red Admirals and occasional Humming Bird
moths. Most of the other Michaelmas daisies
come from America, and the proper determination
of the many different species has been a sore
puzzle to all American botanists ; but they were
taken in hand by the late Asa Gray, who brought
them into good order ; yet even he, though so
great a botanist, hesitated for some time to under-
take to clear up the confusion, and when he did
so he has left a record. " Never was there so
rascally a genus ; they reduce me to" despair."
The difficulty has arisen from the fact that they
hybridise very easily, and there are, besides the
garden hybrids, many natural ones. Of these
garden hybrids many are very beautiful, but I
really think that none are better, or even so good,
as the types ; and in most small gardens it would
be well for the gardener to confine himself to a
dozen or, perhaps, even half a dozen. These if
grown well, i.e. well fed and looked after, would
give all he would want. There are some which I
should on no account leave out, such as A. amellus,
A. ericcefolius, A. Novce Anglice (blue and red), A.
longifolius ramosus, A. versicolor, A. turbine llus,
and A. grandiflorus. This last one is a most
desirable plant ; in colour it is even a deeper blue
than A. amellus, and it has the great advantage
of flowering so late that in mild seasons it will
give good flowers in December and even at
Christmas ; and the older gardeners recommend

30

Flowers of Autumn

that it should not be allowed to flower out of
doors, but that it should be picked in bud and
brought indoors, when the flowers would gradually
open and remain in full beauty for many weeks.
But it is a little tender, for it is a native of the
Southern United States, and in a severe winter
it is apt to disappear. But among autumn
herbaceous plants, I think none surpass the
autumn crocuses. There are many species
mostly from Eastern Europe, and all are beauti-
ful ; but all are not very easily grown, for they
are capricious, and in many gardens the only
ones that can be grown easily are C. speciosus and
C. nudiflorus, and these are really the handsomest,
and when they are once established they increase
rapidly. In my garden the one that has made
itself most at home is C. pulchellus^ a lovely pale
blue with white anthers — this sows itself, not only
where it was planted, but in the turf near it.

Autumnal flowering shrubs are a great feature
in the garden, but I can only mention a few.
The autumn roses are in many cases, especially
among the hybrid teas and Chinas, superior to
those in summer ; certainly they have been so
this autumn, and where roses are grown in large
quantities, I think it a good thing to sacrifice the
summer blooms for the sake of the increased
beauty in the autumn flowers. A very pretty
autumn shrub is the Abelia Chinensis ; it seldom
flowers before the middle of September, but it
lasts in flower six weeks or more ; and the com-

In My Vicarage Garden

bination of the reddish-brown stems, and the
abundance of the small white flowers, each set in
a pale-brown starry calyx, gives a combination of
colour that is exceedingly pretty. Another half-
shrubby good autumn flower is the Phygelius
Capensis, and the arrangement of the flowers is
worth noticing. Each flower-stem or petiole
starts from the main stem at a right angle, and
from this the flower hangs at a second right angle,
so that the main stem, the petiole, and the flower
form three sides of a square. The arrangement
for the fertilization is very elaborate, but if it
should fail, the flower as it falls is like a tube
open at both ends, and in falling to the ground
the bottom ring forces together pistil and stamens,
and so produces fertilization. I also strongly re-
commend the despised fuchsias as among the best
of autumn decorative shrubs. They are rather
more popular now than they were some years
ago, when it was considered an artistic heresy to
admire them, but they are still seldom seen ; yet
they are quite hardy, though most of them die
down in the winter, and in the autumn they give
an abundance of flowers borne on bushes that are
never unsightly.

The fruit-bearing trees and shrubs of autumn
add largely to the beauty of a garden. I do not
know why so few people grow the Japanese Per-
simmon (Diospyros Kaki\ but I seldom see it in
the open ground. Yet it is quite hardy, has very
handsome foliage, and when the tree has a good

32

Flowers of Autumn

crop of fruit it is a really striking object, for the
fruit is as large as an orange, of a bright gold
colour at first, gradually turning, as it ripens, to
a rich crimson. The sea buckthorn — Hippophcs
rhamnoides — is another shrub very seldom seen,
but always admired ; the contrast between the
pale grey foliage and the orange-coloured fruit
is unusual and beautiful. It is a native of Great
Britain, along the sea-coast, delighting in sand
dunes ; but it is a dioecious shrub, so that it is
necessary to have a plant of each sex. And,
taking the word " fruit " in its full botanical sense,
i.e. the part that bears the seed, it would be
wrong not to mention among autumnal fruit-
trees the common traveller's joy, that is now so
beautiful in every hedgerow. Few wild plants
have been so noticed as this, and every European
country seems to have given it a separate name,
proving its popularity. Gerard claims to have
given it the name of traveller's joy ; before his
time the English name was hedge vine, or downy
vine, for "the hedges in summer are in many
places al whyte wyth the downe of thys vine "
(Turner). It is this " down " which has given it
so many names, as "old man's beard," "angel's
tears," etc., and it is this down which gives to it
its great autumnal beauty. The wild one is too
rampant a plant to be admitted into gardens, but
I can strongly recommend two species that should
be in every garden. One is C. paniculata, a
Japanese plant of recent introduction, a very
c 33

In My Vicarage Garden

rapid climber, and producing an abundance of
sweet-scented flowers in October, somewhat re-
sembling the South European C. flammula, but
with much handsomer foliage ; the other is
C. orientalis, or graveolens, with pale yellow
flowers, or in the variety Tuganica, golden yellow,
followed by very beautiful heads of seed, as large
or larger than the Traveller's Joy, but much more
silky. Before leaving the flowers of autumn I
feel bound to say something about the autumnal
gorse (U. nanus\ because in writing about it
among early spring flowers I was taken to task
for confusing between the common and dwarf
gorse ; my critics saying that the dwarf gorse is
the flower of summer, and the common one of
winter and spring. I cannot fully go into the
question, but I may say very shortly, and I hope
without rudeness, that I was right ; I have lately
seen the dwarf one in full flower, and so it will
remain till after Christmas, in many places nestling
under its taller relation.

I have left myself too small a space for the
colours of autumn ; it is a very large subject, and
the more I study them the more I feel how little
I know about them, and the more also I feel
surprised that so little account of them is ever
taken in scientific descriptions. To me it seems
that the autumn colours of tree foliage are as
absolutely a fixed mark of the tree as the colour
of the flowers, and to some extent even more so.
But scientific botany will not allow of it. Long

34

Flowers of Autumn

ago Linnaeus laid it down as a canon that colour
could not be used as a differentia — it is too
changeable ; color in eadem specie mire ludit hinc
in differentia nil valet ; and we must agree that
so it must be. Yet differences of colour are
noted in flowers, and it is not easy to say why
they should not be noted in leaves, but they are
not. This year the autumn tints were very late,
and in most cases very poor. In the Thames
valley the beech showed no change of colour
even in the second and third weeks in October,
and in my own garden, the Parrotia Persica, often
a marvel of many colours, showed none this
year. On the other hand, the Salisburia was
as beautiful as ever, but very late and for a
very short time ; and, as in former years, the
Rhus cotinoides was by far the most beautiful
of all autumnal shrubs. The thin leaves allow
the light to shine through them, and when so seen
I can only compare their colour to the richest old
cathedral ruby glass ; the mixture of deep crimson,
with a suspicion of gold, is almost peculiar to this
fine North American shrub. I must not dwell
further on the autumn tints and colours except
to say that every year I see something of fresh
interest and beauty in them. This ye'ar I note
two things that I had not noted before. In the
Salisburia the rich colour begins at the lowest
branch of the tree and works upwards ; with most
other trees the course is different ; and in Coton-
easter horizontalis the deep red of the leaves begins

35

In My Vicarage Garden

close to the central stem of the branch and works
outwards, so that close to the stem the colour of
the branch or branchlet is deep red on the inside
and pure green on the outside. One other remark
on the colours and I have finished with them. In
America the autumn colours are of a brilliancy of
which we know nothing here ; I have not seen
them, but all the accounts agree in giving the
prevailing colour as red or scarlet. With us they
are more or less yellow, probably really so for the
most part, except in the beeches, but with the
poets they are always yellow. Shakespeare talks
of "the sear and yellow leaf" and of " beauteous
spring to yellow autumn turned " ; and he describes
autumn as the time

When yellow leaves a few or more do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,

and other poets follow suit. But one essential
feature of our country scenery is wanting in
colour of any sort, and this I have never seen
noticed in any author. Our hedges get no
colour ; they are simply brown lines skirting the
fields, except in very old hedges, where the planted
hawthorn has been covered, and sometimes even
destroyed, by a natural growth of maple, hop,
night-shade, and bryony. Then they show a rich
picture of many colours.

I have said enough to show that to me autumn
is not a dreary or cheerless season in the garden,

36

Flowers of Autumn

and if we may learn a parable from the season I
should say it is not, or need not be, a dreary
season in human life. If a man will of set purpose
lament over the approach of his autumn or its
actual arrival, living only on past remembrances
and fading memories, it is open to him to do so,
but he must take the consequences on himself
and blame himself more than the unavoidable
time of life. To those who like to look on the
bright side of things, I would recommend a very
beautiful chapter, entitled, " 1'Automne," in the
" Connaisance de Tame," of M. Gratry. It gives
in a very striking way the advantages and dis-
advantages of the autumn of our lives, with a
large balance in favour of the advantages. No,
I cannot allow that the " calm decay " of autumn
is altogether dreary ; true it is that the flowers
have passed away, and the swallows are gone :
but flowers and swallows do not make up the
whole of life, and " Time will bring on Summer,"
and the swallows will return.

37

CHAPTER V

THE MIXED GARDEN

I DO not wish to enter into the vexed question
whether "bedding-out" and "carpet-gardening"
are worthy of the name of true gardening. The
question is a very old one, and has often been
debated with unnecessary warmth. For I hold
that there is no such thing in gardening as fixed
canons binding on all, but that a garden is,
indeed, "the greatest refreshment to the spirits
of man/' and if one man is more refreshed by the
stiffness of a bedded-out garden, and another by
the greater freedom of a mixed garden, let each
please himself in his own way : " let every man,"
as Parkinson said, " if he like of these plans, take
what may please his mind, or out of these or his
own conceit frame any other to his fancy, or
cause other to be done as he liketh best." Yet I
must say that bedded out gardens give me very
little pleasure ; the monotony of the same patterns
and colours for four months of the year, and then
(very often, though not always) bare earth for the
remainder, is to me wearisome and oppressive.
That there are advantages in the system I do not
deny. Where a gardener or his employers have
no real love of flowers, or little knowledge of

3*

The Mixed Garden

them, and only require that the ground should
be " furnished " during the summer months, the
bedding-out will exactly do for them what they
want. The order is to supply " a blaze of
flowers," and if a blaze of flowers is the test of
good gardening then a bedded-out garden in the
summer months shows the perfection of gardening.
And in some places it seems almost necessary.
As a foreground to large, stately houses the
bedded-out parterre forms a fitting ornament ;
and it also seems in its right place in front of
such buildings as the great palm-house at Kew,
where all the immediate surroundings are stiff
and artificial. Even where the circumstances are
not such as these, I would leave it to each man's
taste to arrange his garden as he thinks best. I
am not bound to follow his example, but I
certainly have no right to impute want of taste
to an arrangement which does not please me.
Within certain limits I can admire the stiffest
bedded-out garden — the individual flowers at
least have their charm, though the standing rule
of bedding-out is that the individual is to be sunk
in the mass ; but there is one limit to my admira-
tion. In no way can I admire the so-called
carpet or cushion beds, in which certain patterns
are worked out as flat as possible. Such beds I
can in no way call gardening. They represent
the maximum of labour with the minimum of
healthy results ; they are the degraded successors
of the " knots " of our forefathers, and can only

39

In My Vicarage Garden

be passed by with an averted eye. I am told
they represent rich mosaics, or Oriental carpets.
If that is the object, and if we are to have mosaics
and carpets on our lawns, I should prefer a bed
of encaustic tiles, or a carpet. This would
produce the same result with less labour and less
expense, and at times would be useful.

But I have spoken too much on this. My
subject is the mixed garden, or the garden of
mixed borders. The name is a modern one,
though the thing is old. It is, in fact, \.\\z facilis
hortus of Martial, which he contrasted with the
villa :—

" Otiosis ordinata myrtetis,
Viduaque platano, tonsilique buxeto." — III. 57.

and an amusing description of one, in which the
principle is carried out to an absurd extent, is
given in the Spectator, No. 477. (The supposed
writer says he is one who is looked upon as a
humorist in gardening.) The name is a modern
one, because it was found necessary to invent
some name which would show that the garden
was no longer wholly given up to bedding-out,
but it has different meanings with different
writers, and by most it is taken to mean a border
of large herbaceous plants (usually a shrubbery
border) in which old-fashioned plants may be
allowed a home, but on which very little care or
thought is spent, while the real labour of the
garden is given to the smart and formal portion

40

The Mixed Garden

where the bedded-out borders are in all their
splendour. Such is not my idea of a mixed
garden. I mean a garden which is entirely made
up of mixed borders, except in the case of very
large places, where a formal garden may some-
where easily find its fitting place. And such a
garden may be of any size, from the three
hundred acres or more at Kew (probably the
finest mixed garden in Europe), to the small
square that forms the back garden of most
suburban villas. But whatever the size, the less
formal it is, and the less uniform in the positions
and shapes of the different borders the better.
Milton described the river of Paradise as —

" Visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Poured forth profuse ; "

and Sir Henry Wotton laid down the rule
that there was " a certain contrariety between
building and gardening ; for as fabricks should
be regular, so gardens should be irregular, or at
least cast into a very wild regularity." It is this
" wild regularity " which forms to my mind the
real charm of a good mixed garden ; and it is
this, and not the large collection of different
plants in it, which distinguishes it from other
gardens, because plants grown in such a way may
be allowed to grow in their fullest vigour, and to
develop each its own shape, colour, and character,
without any fear of its transgressing the lines of

In My Vicarage Garden

any well-devised plan, because there is no such
plan to which they must conform.

My ideal of a good mixed garden is one in
which the borders are always full, in which there
is no repetition, so that there can nowhere be
found one yard like another, and which in every
month of the year and in every week can show a
different set of plants in flower. Of such gardens
we have already good and pleasant records in
Miss Hope's Gardens and Woodlands, in Bright's
Year in a Lancashire Garden, in E. V. B.'s Days
and Hours in a Garden, and in other books ;
and all of these are records of gardens of limited
extent. My own garden, including everything,
is less than two acres, and I have very little
glass, so that almost everything must be hardy ;
and yet there is no difficulty in carrying out the
principles I have just laid down. Every border
must be full ; and for this purpose no border is
given up to any one class of plants ; there is a
mixture of shrubs, herbaceous plants, bulbs, and
ferns all joined together, without any respect to
uniformity of outline, or fancied harmonies in
colour, or studied variations in heights, but each
placed where it grows, because that particular
place was supposed to be best suited to its
wants, or sometimes for no better reason than to
fill a vacancy. But even when thus filled blanks
will often occur. Spring bulbs will die down,
and early summer flowers will require to be cut
down even where they do not disappear after

42

The Mixed Garden

flowering ; and the greenhouse plants then be-
come most valuable. Geraniums, begonias, helio-
tropes, calceolarias, verbenas, etc., fill up blanks
in the most satisfactory way, and most of them
having very small roots can, with a little care and
much watering, be transplanted to where they are
wanted all through the summer ; begonias especi-
ally are most kind and patient under such treat-
ment, and can be removed from one place to
another with very little difficulty. Annuals are
equally useful for the same purpose, and many
of them are very beautiful, but they are not so
patient under removal.

But I can best illustrate my meaning by giving
an example ; and I will give it from my own
garden, not boastfully because mine is better than
others of the same sort (I have seen many that
far surpass my own), but because I can write
more correctly from the example close before me.
I am fortunate in having a long wall facing south,
and I am fortunate in having a good alluvial soil,
though too full of lime to allow me to grow many
plants which otherwise I should like to grow.
In front of this wall I have a border about eight
feet wide, edged with rough stones placed on, and
not sunk in, the ground. I will take about a
dozen or fifteen yards, which I suppose to be
about the length of the front borders in most of
the detached suburban villas. In this distance
trained to the wall I have Plagianthus lyalli,
from New Zealand ; Fremontia Calif ornica ;

43

In My Vicarage Garden

clematis coccinea, from Texas ; Budleia Lindleyana,
with trusses of curious purple and grey flowers,
from China ; abuliton vexillarum, from South
America ; and physianthus albens, from Buenos
Ayres. Close under the wall, but not trained to
it, are the so-called Australian daisy, which, how-
ever, comes from Mexico ; the beautiful Caper
plant (capparis spinosa), from South Europe,
which requires an exceptionally fine summer to
flower ; crinum capense and Powelli, from the
Cape of Good Hope ; opuntia, from Brazil ;
amaryllis ackramanni^ the most gorgeous in
colour of all amaryllises, also from Brazil ;
teucrium fruticans, from south of Europe ; and
fuschia excorticata^ a very curious species, from
New Zealand. In the border are yucca angusti-
folia\ olearias from New Zealand; Arum Jacque-
monti, a remarkable hooded arum from the
Himalayas ; cercocarpus, a shrub from (I believe)
South America ; and some cistuses, aguilegias,
penstemons, etc., while the edging is taken up
with different sorts of iberis, Iceland poppy,
aubrietia, lychnis, teucrium aureum, sempervivum,
sedum, saxifrage^ and I say nothing of some of
the commoner plants, or of the spring bulbs
which are dormant and unseen. This particular
length of border is no better than any other part ;
indeed I could have selected some parts which
would contain more, and perhaps more interesting,
plants. I only choose this as showing how in a
very small compass a great variety may be

44

The Mixed Garden

gathered together from all quarters of the world,
varying in their time of flowering, but so arranged
that the border is never dull or empty, but can at
all times of the year show something that is
interesting not only to myself or to a botanist,
but also to unbotanical friends and visitors.

To such borders two objections are commonly
made. They are said to be untidy ; but they
need not be so ; and one-tenth of the care re-
quired for a large bed of geraniums would be
sufficient for a much larger mixed border. They
are said, too, to be lacking in colour, or to have
their colours mixed together without harmony.
The lack of colour depends on the plants selected ;
there are plenty of bright flowers to be found.
The want of harmony in colour I deny. Plants
whose flowers will not (theoretically) harmonise
may be planted in close contact, if only they are
allowed to grow naturally. The colours of the
flowers in a field or wood or hedgerow or Swiss
pasture are mixed together without any respect
to the laws of colour-harmony — yet there is no
discord ; the green leaves and the green grass
sufficiently guard against that — the herbescens
viriditas (Cicero's happy phrase) harmonises all.

45

CHAPTER VI

A BACKWARD SPRING

I CANNOT recollect so backward a spring as the
present j1 everything in the gardens and the fields
is a full month, and in some parts quite six weeks
later than the usual time. It is now the first
week in April, and instead of being able to say
with Gonzalo, as we can in ordinary years —

" How lush and lusty the grass looks ! How green ! "

we see nothing of colour in the fields but a dull,
uniform, dirty yellow. This has come not only
or chiefly from the bitter weather of December
and January, but still more from the second
winter of March. The few bright days that we
had in February caused some plants to start into
growth, but the nights were too cold to allow of
much growth, and then came the fearful blizzard
week, followed by much cold all through the
month of March ; and that second winter seems
to have been more disastrous to the gardens than
all the bitter weather of December and January.
And so it has come to pass that the fields are
bare ; there were very few primroses for Easter,

1 Written in 1891.
46

A Backward Spring

and as for the daffodils, they did not justify their
name of Lent lilies, and are still very scarce.
Their proud boast that they —

" Come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty," l

will scarcely hold true this year. Probably the
swallows will be late, but they are often seen in
the first week of April, and some will even dare a
few days sooner ; but with the exception of a few
of the wild daffodil (IV. pseudo-narcissus} and its
varieties, the narcissi are not yet even showing
their buds, and in some sorts the leaves are only
just above ground. I suppose, however, that
Shakespeare was thinking of the wild daffodil,
and so he still is right.

Yet the garden is not all barren. The kitchen-
garden is sadly bare, and I hear on all sides that
the market-gardeners have grievous losses ; but
the flower-garden even now has many beauties,
and a walk round the garden can give much
pleasure. Let us look at the shrubs first ; there
are not many in flower, but what there are are
very welcome and interesting.

Banksia roses are barely showing their buds.
I have often had good bunches even at an early
Easter ; but the Forsythia suspensa is fairly in
flower, and I know of no shrub more to be
recommended as a spring-flowering shrub than
this Japanese climber. It is perfectly hardy, so

1 The swallows came on April 5, and the daffodils had then made
no progress.

47

In My Vicarage Garden

hardy that it does not require a wall, and would
probably do well trained up a tree ; but it
deserves a wall, and being a fast grower it will
very soon cover a large extent of a high wall.
The beauty of it lies in its long, graceful wreaths
of golden flowers ; wreaths six feet long are not
uncommon, and after the flowering it should be
pruned, and then it has a good appearance all the
summer. Close by in a sheltered corner, but not
trained to the wall, I have the Japanese hawthorn,
Photinia serrulata. It is not in flower ;- it seldom
flowers in England, but I value it for its beauty
in spring. At all times it is a handsome shrub,
with its bright, shining leaves (hence its name), but
at this time of the year the young shoots at the
ends of the branches are of a deep crimson colour,
so that at a little distance the shrub looks like a
fine flowering shrub with its flowers half-expanded.
Then there is the Rhododendron Davuricum, one
of the earliest shrubs that flower in the open
ground (the cheimonanthus and the Lonicera
fragrantissima are earlier, but require a wall).
This is a shrub well worth growing. It is sup-
posed by some to be a geographical variety of
the Alpine rose (R. ferrugineum), but for garden
purposes it is very distinct. Coming from Siberia,
it is perfectly hardy, and is not so particular about
soil as other rhododendrons ; but I cannot say it
is so pretty, as the flowers stand singly at the
ends of the branches, and the whole plant has
rather an untidy habit ; but the flowers come very

48

A Backward Spring

early (it has been in flower here quite six weeks),
and the leaves are covered with curious glandular
dots, which make them pretty objects under the
microscope. Another shrub or small tree that
much interests me is the Parottia Persica, from
the Eastern Caucasus, and apparently as hardy
as an elm. It is one of the most beautiful shrubs
for autumnal foliage, but it is interesting also for
its flowers, which appear in this month or earlier.
The tree does not flower till it is of some age, but
then it seems to flower freely, and the flowers are
curious and pretty. They are little balls about the
size of a nut, composed entirely of bright crimson
anthers. On my own tree there are only these
male flowers ; the female flowers I have not seen,
and know nothing about them. Close to this I
have a shrub of the Cornus Mas. Mine is the
variegated form, and it is usually grown for the
sake of the variegated foliage, and deservedly so,
for sprays of the short branches are excellent for
picking, as they last a long time, and are bright
and clear in colour. I have found them very
useful for altar vases, but at present there are no
leaves, yet the shrub is pretty from the multitude
of little golden starry flowers with which it is
covered. The Garrya Elliptica is very shabby
this year, and it would be difficult to gather a
good catkin from it, so I pass it by. The Daphne
Mezereon is in full flower, and where it does well
a large bush is a pretty object, and the scent of
the flowers is delightful ; but I have never suc-
D 49

In My Vicarage Garden

ceeded with it, though it grows easily in many of
the cottage gardens of the neighbourhood. This
exhausts the flowering shrubs now in flower, with
the exception of the peaches and nectarines, which
I think we should grow for their pretty flowers,
even if there were no fruit to follow, and with the
exception of one other which deserves a paragraph
to itself.

I have on my lawn an old circular bed per-
manently planted with a broad band of the dwarf
S. European heath, Erica carnea, and' inside that
another band of the old yellow crocus, the
remainder of the bed being carpeted with the
beautiful leaves of the autumn cyclamen, C.
hederaefolium. In summer the centre is gay
with an old plant of fuchsia globosa, and some
Japanese maples. The heath and crocus in
ordinary years would have passed away long
before this, but they are still in great beauty, and
have been for some weeks ; the heath was in
blossom in the beginning of February. I wonder
this heath is not more grown. As far as I know,
it will grow in any soil ; it is very inexpensive,
and if cut in close after flowering it forms a rich
green cushion all the year. To bees, too, it is
very attractive ; I always see on it the first bees
of the year. I am sorry to say it is equally
attractive to pigeons. Two years ago the pigeons
ate off every bud as soon as it appeared, yet last
year and this year they have not touched it ; and
why they should have stripped it one year and

A Backward Spring

left it untouched the next is a puzzle. And I
mention the bed because it is a good instance
of a bed kept for many years in beauty, with
very little trouble. The crocuses must have
been there more than twenty years ; the heath
has to my certain knowledge grown there for
more than forty years, while the original cyclamen
plants from which the rest have spread were
planted in 1817.

I will now go to some of the herbaceous and
bulbous plants in flower. These have fared much
better than the shrubs, having been for six weeks
completely covered by a thick blanket of snow.
During that time I think the ground was never
frozen. I did not try it with a thermometer, but
I often thrust a stick through the snow into the
ground, and I always found it soft and unfrozen.
I pass by the daffodils, except to say again how
thoroughly they have this year belied their tradi-
tional character, which all our poets have loved
to dwell on. Many may like to renew their ac-
quaintance with one only, Aubrey de Vere, whose
exquisite ode to the daffodil begins : —
" O love-star of the unbeloved March,

Thou comest when first the spring

On winter's verge encroaches :
When gifts that speed on wounded wing

Meet little save reproaches."

and ends : —

" To-day the spring is crowned a queen, but thou
Thy winter hast already ;

In My Vicarage Garden

Take my song's blessing and depart,
Type of true service — unrequited heart ; "

for it seems likely that the daffodils this year will
almost last into the summer. Nor must I stop
long with the Christmas roses. There are still a
few of the true ones (helleborus niger), but they
are poor and ragged, and I have scarcely picked
a good one all the winter. Yet they always have
their interest. I have been looking into their his-
tory, and I cannot believe that our white Christ-
mas rose is the Hellebore of Theophrastus and
Pliny. It differs in many respects, and is not
found at Anticyra, and I think their Hellebore
is our Veratrum. Yet all the old writers identify
it with the classical plant, and speak very posi-
tively about its virtues ; though they seem to
have little ground for the belief beyond the
"signatures," which taught them that a plant
with black roots must be good for the black bile,
melan-cholia. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melan-
choly', has a long chapter on the plant, and evi-
dently believed in it as a cure for melancholy ;
and Cole, in his Adam in Eden, 1657, goes still
further, affirming it to be not only " effectual for
melancholick, dull, and heavy persons, as ques-
tionless it is by signatures," but further " neither
is it without ,great efficacy to cure those that
seeme to be possessed with the Devil." These
virtues it has long lost or never had ; it is used
as a medicine in some parts of Europe, but is
not admitted into the English Pharmacopceia.

52

A Backward Spring

But if the true Christmas rose has failed this
year, the hybrid varieties have been loaded with
flowers, and I admire them much. They lack
the pure beauty of the Christmas rose, but their
great flowers have been well compared to gigantic
apple-blossoms. They will not bear picking, or
if picked they soon fade, but the leaves that come
after the flowers are very handsome ; and a large
clump makes almost an evergreen bush ; and as
the leaves, unlike the flowers, last well in water,
they are very useful among cut flowers. Another
plant, also named from its "signatures," is the
Hepatica, or liverwort ; though its likeness to any
part of the liver is very far-fetched. It has no
value in medicine, and even by Cole " the noble
liverwort is prized more for pleasure to the senses
than for helping any disease," and " for pleasure "
they are most valuable at this time of year, though
Parkinson puts them among the flowers of January.
They are too well known to require any descrip-
tion ; I would only say of them that it is well
never to disturb them ; the older the plant the
better will it flower ; and I would mention one
curious point — that while the single flowers are
among the easiest to cultivate, the double blue
is in many gardens almost an impossibility, and
the double white is so rare that many doubt its
existence. I never saw it, but I was assured by
the late Mr Wheeler, of Warminster (an excellent
gardener, and one of the few nurserymen that are
accurate botanists), that it only occurs as the

53

In My Vicarage Garden

autumnal form of the single red. And a third
plant, also named for its " signatures," is the lung-
wort, or Jerusalem cowslip (Pulmonaria), which
is now a great ornament in the garden, and has
always been a special favourite in English gar-
dens. There are many species, but none more
beautiful than the British P. angustifolia, which is
found in the Isle of Wight and in some parts of
South Hampshire. I found it once near Beaulieu,
in the New Forest. Nor must I leave unm^n-
tioned the lovely dog's tooth violet, now in great
beauty, and certainly one of the most graceful
ornaments of the spring garden in its different
colours of pink, white, or yellow, and as easy to
grow as a crocus. And when I have named the
spring cyclamen (C. Coum), which still carries a
few flowers, and a few anemones where there ought
to be a multitude, I think I have nearly exhausted
the list of herbaceous plants now in flower, though
in most years April would be able to show many
more.

Of bulbs there are not many in flower, but the
few are gems. Snowdrops and crocuses have
almost passed away, and in ordinary seasons
would have quite disappeared, and, as I said
before, the daffodils are only just beginning to
appear. But the squills are at their best, and I
don't know which to admire most, the blue or the
pure white. The white is one of our best spring
flowers, and a good clump with its shiny white
stars is very attractive. It likes to be let alone

54

A Backward Spring

and so do all the squills ; indeed, I have never
been convinced of the good of constantly taking
up and drying my bulbs ; in some soils it may be
necessary, but I think it is entirely a question of
soil. The grape hyacinths are also now in flower,
most of them not so bright in colour as the squills,
but the white variety is very pure. The chiono-
doxas increase in beauty as well as in number
every year, and this year they are especially fine,
but I will say no more of them now, except that
their complete hardiness has been well proved
this winter, for they pushed up their lovely flowers
through the snow.

Certainly, in spite of all we have gone through,
the garden is not barren, and, like everything else
in this world, the bad weather has, to some extent,
brought its own compensation. If we had a flower-
less February and March, the flowers have not been
lost, and we are having them now, and shall pro-
bably see in May many more flowers than are
usually seen in that month. The prospect is
really very hopeful ; judging by the plants that
have already flowered, and by the buds that are
now appearing, it seems likely that there will be
an abundance of flowers ; and for that we shall
be indebted to the growing summer and brilliant
autumn of last year, and perhaps in some measure
to the retarding power of the long, severe winter.
I do not pretend to be a weather prophet, but if
we can put any trust in averages and proverbs we
must expect a wet summer, which will not be

55

In My Vicarage Garden

without its use to the plants that have been badly
injured by the winter and are making a struggle
for life. The old proverb says —

" There is no debt paid so nigh
As the wet pays to the dry ; "

and taking the twelve months ending the 3 1 st of
March there is a debt of twelve inches of rain.
But all this is uncertain ; and does not this very
uncertainty form one of the chief pleasures of gar-
dening ? It would be tame work if it was always
successful and if we could have it all our own way.
And is it not our uncertain and much-abused
English climate, with all the difficulties and dis-
appointments that it brings with it, which has
made our English and Scotch gardeners among
the very best in the world ?

PART II

ELSEWHERE
VARIOUS

57

CHAPTER VII

SUNSHINE AND SHADE IN THE GARDEN

I AM sure that half the science of gardening
consists in knowing where to place different plants.
A man may receive a bundle of new plants, most
of which he may never have seen before, and it
may easily be a sore puzzle to him to decide in
what places it would be best to plant. The
gardener of much experience, even if he may not
have had to do before with the particular plants
sent, will yet, by a sort of intuition, be able, by
the appearance of many of them, at once to
decide on their right places ; but it requires a
long experience, and the longest experience will
sometimes make mistakes. The beginner finds
himself face to face with a real difficulty. He
may be told the country from which the plants
come, but that very often will not help him much ;
and he may be told that some are quite hardy,
while others are more or less tender, but even
that does not solve his difficulties. He wishes to
do the best he can for his new arrivals, and he
determines that they shall have all the advantages
that a good position will give them ; but he often
makes fatal mistakes, and one of the first that he
will be sure to make will be to place many of the

59

In My Vicarage Garden

tender plants in the brightest and sunniest place
he can find — it seems to him nothing but natural
kindness to do so. But he soon finds out his
error ; the tender plants may be so tender that
they cannot stand the full blaze even of an
English sun ; and though they may be sub-
tropical, they ask to be protected from bright sun.
In their own country they may have a warm,
perhaps a hot climate ; but the fact is that a very
large proportion of our exotic plants are in their
own countries wood plants. This is markedly the
case with the plants of Switzerland and other
parts of Southern Europe. They are found wild
in woods chiefly, many of them in the open
glades, but many also in the dense shade of the
fir woods.

How such plants seek for shade and protection
can be seen in the nearest hedgerow. An old
hedgerow is a close mat of plants of all sorts
with scarcely a single open space ; the whole
surface is covered with brambles, nettles, deadly
nightshade, dead nettles, and many others, and
yet through the thick mass, and nestling under
the most unlikely bushes we find delicate flowers
of many sorts growing vigorously, and apparently
most happy in their surroundings. And even
wild plants which are not in hedgerows, but grow
in the open fields and meadows, apparently
exposed to the full blaze of the sun and the full
blasts of cold wind, are yet largely protected by
the herbage among which they grow. Their

60

Sunshine and Shade

roots are protected ; the close herbage prevents a
rapid evaporation of moisture, and the roots,
except in a very prolonged drought, are kept cool
and moist. High Alpine plants give a very good
example of this. Many a plant-lover in his search
for the distinctly Alpine plants comes upon or
sees at a distance a bare-looking hillside in which
it seems hopeless to search for any good plants.
But perhaps it is these unpromising-looking places
that will yield him the richest harvest. I had a
good lesson in this point in the Tyrolese Dolo-
mites, going from Predazzo to San Martino by
the Rolle Pass ; where about a mile or more on
each side of the top of the Pass, was a very
barren-looking Alp which seemed as unlikely a
place for good plants as possible. But from its
elevation (6600 feet) and other appearances, I
felt sure it would be worth a visit, and I went to
it more than once. It was a carpet of high
Alpines ; it will be enough to mention ranunculus
thora and rutifolius, phyteuma serratum, erigeron
uniflorus, veronica bellidoides, soldanella alpina, and
many others, including rare saxifrages and gentians
and a curious carpet of Edelweiss, not two inches
high and almost stemless ; while a little higher
up was potentilla nitida and rhododendron chamo3-
cistuS) and the whole Alp was thickly set with
arnica montana, which in a short time would be a
mass of gold. Now all these plants were fully
exposed to sun and wind, but not one of them
was standing alone in a place all to itself; they

61

In My Vicarage Garden

were growing out of a turf of short grass, which,
though short, gave protection and shade to the
roots.

The same lesson of the value of shade and
protection was taught in other ways. One of the
most graceful of the clematises, and, as I think,
quite the most beautiful of all wild climbers, is the
blue atragene alpina. It is abundant in Tyrol,
but it is always growing amongst the fir trees,
up which it loves to climb. Another lovely plant
that always rejoices the heart of the man who
sees it wild for the first time is the ladies' slipper
(cypripedium calceolus). I saw this abundantly
near San Martino, and, wherever I saw it, it was
forcing its way through the lower prostrate
boughs of pinus mughus ; it is, I know, found
in other positions, but it was only in that
position that I found it. It was the same with
the aquilegia alpina, of which I found several
at Piora ; but in every case the flower was coming
through the alpenrose. It is quite possible that
in both these cases the plant would grow else-
where, but the pine and the alpenrose protected
them from the cattle and the goats ; and it showed
that such places were quite fitted for their perfect
growth. The same thing often occurs in gardens;
every gardener knows how apt weeds are to come
up in the very midst of his pet plants ; groundsel
delights in the close neighbourhood of- other
plants ; and the wild violet and the dandelion
have a most objectionable habit of sowing them-
62

Sunshine and Shade

selves in the centre of good plants, from which it
is often difficult to get rid of them. In these
cases, too, it is possible that the seed is sown
elsewhere also, but those sown in the middle of
other plants are protected from or overlooked by
the birds, and so come to the perfection which we
do not ask for. But beyond protection given
by one plant to another, I feel sure that all plants
are more parasitical than we are generally inclined
to fancy. I do not mean that they are parasiti-
cal in the same sense that the mistletoe, dodder,
broomrapes, toothworts, and epiphytal orchids
are parasites, actually living on, and in many
cases destroying, their hosts ; but they are
parasites in the sense of the better class of Greek
and Roman parasites, not necessarily sponges, but
with a liking to live in company ; they dislike
solitude.

Indeed, the whole subject of protection to
vegetation is curious and far-reaching, and I saw
a remarkable instance of it lately. In 1899 there
was a very remarkable landslip at Airolo, which
practically brought down a large side of the
mountain, exposing a bare surface over a great
extent. I saw it in 1900, and it Was curious to
note that in some parts fir-trees were standing
upright on the bared soil, even in large patches ;
but wherever these patches occurred, the trees had
been saved by the presence of a rock more or less
large, the size of the rock determining the size of
the saved patch below it. Now this meant that

63

In My Vicarage Garden

in those patches vegetation will regain its full power
many years before the unprotected patches, and the
value of protection will be proved for generations.
To bring this matter into practical gardening.
It is now perhaps forty years or more since the
discovery was made that the best, perhaps the
only sure way, of growing Lilium auratum was to
grow it among bushes, especially rhododendrons,
and the same thing is now found to be the best
way of growing bamboos, which rejoice in shaded
roots with a power of bringing their long shoots
into light and sunshine. The same rule, also, is
found to hold good with many tender shrubs ;
nearly all the Chilian shrubs, and many others,
are found to grow easily on a north wall, i.e. a
wall facing north, and will perish on a south
wall ; I mean especially such plants as Lapageria,
Tricuspidaria, Solatium jasminoides, Ficus repens,
Stauntonia, Mitraria, and many others. And in
all the best gardens the value of shade and pro-
tection is now fully recognised. At Kew there
are many very attractive beds composed of one
shrub, and with lilies and other plants coming up
in their midst. Mr Wilson's celebrated garden at
Wisley owes, I think, the greater part of its suc-
cess to the abundance of shade which he is able
to get in his wood. In Miss Jekyll's equally
celebrated garden at Munstead the most interest-
ing parts are those in which she so cleverly
cultivates her plants in a thin wood. It has come
to be recognised that a garden without trees and

64

Sunshine and Shade

shrubs is not only ugly in itself, but it loses the
great help in the cultivation of plants which trees
and shrubs will give.

I do not mean to say that gardeners should
avoid putting their tender plants in the sun
altogether, and there is one class of plants to
which I would give all the sun I could find for
them. These are the early spring flowers. In
their own country they may be wood or marsh
plants, but with us they are all the better for, and
fully deserve, the sunniest spots we can give them.
I mean such plants as the spring cyclamens, early
irises, crocuses, snowdrops, etc. But the point I
wish to bring out is not only that a shady garden
is not a garden in which gardening can only be
carried on under difficulties, but that shade and
protection, whether from trees, shrubs, or walls,
are great helps to the gardener, and that without
them it is really hopeless to make the garden a
thing of delight.

The old writers, and some modern ones, have
loved to moralise on the beauties of living under
the shadow of a protecting power. Spenser has
a short fable about a bramble that resents the
neighbourhood of a great oak ; but when the oak
was cut down he was "naked left and disconsolate"
and died ; and Shakespeare says : —

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,

and draws a moral. But the moral is too obvious
to require me to dwell further upon it.
E 65

CHAPTER VIII

CARPET PLANTS

I WISH to say something more on the " Carpet
Plants," which I mentioned in my paper on the
Flowers of Spring.1 A short paper will be
enough for the purpose.

By carpet plants, I do not at all mean the
plants that generally compose the so-called
carpet beds. These beds are, in my view, the
worst form of summer bedding, being generally
composed of stiff, parallel or concentric lines of
sempervivums, echeverias, and other plants, so
arranged as to give the impression of a small
carpet or rug. They are dearly loved by many
gardeners — even many good gardeners — and are
the especial delight of nurserymen ; but I cannot
admire them, while I do very much admire a
good use of carpet plants. For these carpet
plants the following points are necessary : they
must be evergreen, that is, they must not only
clothe the ground in summer and autumn, but all
through the year ; they must be of a soft, tender
nature, so that such bulbs as snowdrops, crocuses,
squills, chionodoxa, etc., and such plants as ane-

66

Carpet Plants

mones, and dog's-tooth violets may come up
through them without doing or receiving injury ;
they must be very close-growing, shallow-rooted,
and spreading in every direction without laying
bare their centres. There are many such plants,
but they have to be well chosen and carefully
looked after. The ideal carpet plant for English
gardens is our lawn grass ; it is the plant that
makes all the difference between English and
continental gardens ; but it is only good as a
lawn plant ; if allowed to wander into the flower
beds it very soon becomes a pestilent weed. Not
only has it the habit of placing itself in the very
midst of good plants, and so choking them, but,
like all other grasses, including the bamboos, it is
such a gross feeder that it soon takes to itself all
the moisture and good food that it can reach ; so
as a carpet plant for the flower beds it is worse
than useless.

About forty years ago a plant was introduced
which promised to be not only a rival of the grass
for lawns, but also a beautiful carpet plant in our
borders. It was a Sagina, but whether 5. pro-
cumbens or ,S. pilifera I am not sure. It was
first grown to a large extent in a garden at
Sydenham, and there I saw it. The garden was
a small one of the usual suburban type, enclosed
by the house and three walls, and, as far as I
recollect, the whole space was carpeted with this
Saginat and a most beautiful carpet it made,
having such a likeness to a rich green velvet-pile
67

In My Vicarage Garden

carpet that one felt almost loath to tread on it
with dirty shoes, and of an even texture through-
out, nowhere above half an inch high, and with
no vacant spaces. It had a rapid sale, but it
was soon found to degenerate, and in many cases
to die completely, and I have never since heard
of its being used either as a carpet or as a rock
plant. About the same time another plant was
introduced with the character of being a perfect
carpet plant. This was the Chrysanthemum or
Pyrethrum Tchihalchewii^ from Russia, and though
not so close in habit as the Sagina, it was un-
doubtedly a plant that in some places might be
useful, where a coarse carpet would suffice. But
it soon proved itself to be very capricious,
doing fairly well in some gardens, but refusing
to grow at all in others, and it was, 1 believe,
found to be useless under or even near trees ;
so it had to be given up, though where it
grows well it makes a very pretty rockwork
plant.

But there are many plants of real beauty which
make beautiful carpet plants, answering all the
conditions that I have laid down. I place among
the very best the Campanula Portenschlagiana,
from Dalmatia. It is so perfectly hardy and ever-
green that I never knew it the least injured in
the hardest winter ; and with me it keeps a
uniform height during the winter, not above two
or three inches, and without any bare, brown
places. Then, in the summer, it is a mass of

68

Carpet Plants

lovely pale blue flowers, which last a long time,
and it does not object to a crocus or two coming
up in its midst, though it would not like a thick
mass. Altogether, I think it one of my most
useful plants for growing in full sun, and though
I call it a carpet plant, it is excellent also as what
I may call a curtain or tapestry plant. I know
an old brick kitchen-garden wall in Devonshire
on the top of which a plant of this campanula
had found a suitable home, and from the top of
the wall the plant has spread downwards, rooting
and sowing itself in every coin of vantage till
it has covered the wall for several yards in
length.

I reckon many of the acaenas among good
carpet plants, if only the winter is not too severe ;
but in a very severe winter the plants are apt to
become bare in places and so lose their beauty
for a time, but they generally recover it soon, and
one of them A. pinnatifida will generally be a
close green carpet through even a hard winter.
These acaenas are mostly from South America
and New Zealand, and are of very various
colours, one very hardy one, A. inermis, being of
a decided slate colour ; and they all produce
burs, with thorns of different shapes, but all more
or less clinging to anything that touches them ;
and it is on account of these burs that the
plants get their name from the Greek axa/wx, a
thorn or goad.

I have not space to speak of many other good

In My Vicarage Garden

carpet plants, and can do no more than name a
few. The mossy saxifrages are more cushion
than carpet plants, and are very apt to get brown
patches which are unsightly. All the thymes are
good for the purpose, especially the pure white
and the dark red. Arenaria Balearica is a first-
rate carpet plant for stones in damp places, but
it is somewhat difficult to establish. Hutchinsia
Alpina makes an excellent dark green very close
carpet, and when covered with its pretty pure
white flowers is one of the best flowers of
spring. Many of the low-growing Veronicas,
especially V. repens, are almost as good, and
I will close the list with Herniaria diandra,
which, though only an annual, will often cover
a considerable space, and keep green all the
winter.

This, of course, is not a complete list of the
many good carpet plants that we may use, but it
will be enough to show that we have many good
plants which will cover the ground for us, and
soon make a brave show of greenery at all times.
There is one point in the cultivation of these
plants which may be worth mentioning. A good
carpet cannot be made in one season, even by
planting several plants together, for I have found
by experience that one plant allowed to spread
and increase in its own natural way makes the
best mass in the end. Gardeners are often too
apt to try to get perfection at a stroke ; they

70

Carpet Plants

would like their gardens to be " like Adonis'
gardens,

That one day bloomed and fruitful were the next,"

HENRY VI., Act i, s. 6,

but for permanent good results such haste does
not make good speed, or good work ; and in the
end patience wins the race in gardening as in so
many other paths of life.

CHAPTER IX

WHILE THE GARDEN IS UNDER SNOW

FOR nearly a month the garden has been com-
pletely closed ; in such a December as we have
just been passing through all out-of-door work is
necessarily stopped.1 Yet the gardener is not,
therefore, entirely without work, or without even
pleasant work, and if he is fortunate enough
either to have a good botanical library himself,
or to have ready access to one, his time may
indeed be pleasantly occupied, and in a way
which will bring good results when he can again
take up his usual work.

I suppose no one who loves his garden is
entirely without books on his favourite subject ;
and, indeed, I have always found that a lover
of gardens and flowers is also more or less a lover
and reader of books. In our country villages the
chief applicants for books from the lending library
are the gardeners, and the more they love their
gardens and their flowers the more they wish to
read about them ; and the more they get to know
from books the more they desire to know ; and
when cut off from their gardens by snow and

1 Written in January 1891, but altered in some places.
72

The Garden under Snow

frost they still find plenty of employment and
pleasant work in reading of their favourites ; and
the best gardeners are the greatest readers, for
Sir Thomas Browne's saying holds good with
gardening and botany as much as in other pur-
suits, " They do most by books, who could do
much without them."

And the gardener has no lack of choice. Mr
Baydon Jackson in 1881 put the number of
botanical works then existing at over eight
thousand ; since that time the number has been
much increased ; and as several of the works are
in many volumes there must be certainly over ten
thousand volumes now to choose from. Many of
these are sumptuous books of great price, such as
Sibthorp's Flora Grceca, which is said to have cost
;£ 1 0,000 ; and some are of excessive rarity, such
as Rudbeck's beautiful Campi Elysii, of which
only one perfect copy is known, now in the
Sherardian Library at Oxford. Such books can
seldom be seen out of public libraries ; but we
have many such libraries in England, and there
are probably few better botanical libraries than
can be seen any day at Kew, or at the South
Kensington Natural History Museum, or at the
British Museum, or in the Lindley Library, in
charge of the Horticultural Society. But the
gardener wants books of his own, that he can
study by his own fireside, in the long winter
evenings, or when all outside work is stopped by
frost and snow. He will be fortunate if among

73

In My Vicarage Garden

such books he can reckon the Botanical Magazine,
for I should consider it as almost, if not quite, the
first work to be desired in a botanical library.
With its 127 volumes, containing 7800 plates of
flowers, it is a library in itself; and though its
early volumes are more than a hundred years old
(it commenced in 1787), yet it has always been
conducted on the same lines, and the older
volumes are especially interesting. Mr Bright, in
his Year in a Lancashire Garden, records for his
December work : —

We have been looking over old volumes of Curtis's
Botanical Magazine, and have been trying, not always
successfully, to get a number of old forgotten plants of
beauty, now of rarity.

It has been my good fortune always to have
had access to Curtis, and it has been my pleasure,
too, to hunt up in it the old plants which were a
pleasure to our fathers and grandfathers ; and I
never look through a volume without learning
something new. The entire work is expensive,
and not easily procured, but the fifty-two volumes
of the first series can be bought cheaply, and odd
volumes are often on sale for very little, and as
each volume is complete in itself, I know of few
more useful books to give to a young gardener
than a few volumes of the Botanical Magazine.

Another excellent book of about the same age
is Miller's Gardener's Dictionary, a book often
seen on the bookshelves of good libraries, but not
often read. Yet it is full of information from

74

The Garden under Snow

beginning to end, and I know of no book so
useful in its particular way. For the history of
the plants and the old plant names given by the
older writers it is most valuable, and the cultural
directions are excellent. Though the last edition
in four folio volumes was published nearly a
hundred years ago, I know of no book that has
supplanted it as a botanical and gardening
dictionary, and, as it can be bought for a few
shillings, I can safely recommend it to all.

Different gardeners will, of course, be attracted
by different books. Some will only be satisfied
with purely scientific botany ; others will be
attracted by books treating of geographical and
geological botany ; others will only care for
books which tell how to grow and improve
flowers ; and each and all will find abundance
of books to their different tastes. My own taste
has always been for the old writers, especially
those of the seventeenth and early part of the
eighteenth centuries ; and without denying the
excellent work done by many foreign writers of
that date, I have always taken a special delight
in our own English writers. There were many
English writers on botany before Gerard ; but his
work is really the first English work that popu-
larised botany. It is not truly an English work,
for it is a translation from Dodoens, and the
plates are taken from Tabernaemontanus. Still
there is a great deal of original matter, and the
English is Gerard's own, and is very quaint and

75

In My Vicarage Garden

pleasant reading. The drawback to one's pleasure
in reading him is that I am afraid he was not an
honest man. His method of compiling his book
was not honest, and his editor, Johnson, often
corrects him, and not to his advantage. Thus
Gerard, in his account of the pceony, says that he
found it wild " upon a conny berry in Betsome,
being in the parish of Southfleet, in Kent, two
miles from Gravesend, and in the ground some-
times belonging to a farmer there called John
Bradley ; " but Johnson says : — " I have beene
told that our Author himselfe planted that
Peioniee there, and afterwards seemed to finde
it there by accident." For this reason, among
others, I much prefer Parkinson. His Paradisi
in Sole Paridisus Terrestris (i.e. " Park-in-son's
Earthly Paradise " ) is altogether a delightful
book, and from beginning to end there is a
thoroughly honest ring about it. You feel that
he is telling you nothing about his plants but
what he has himself seen or done, and the wood-
cuts are drawn from the living plants, without the
least exaggeration. The collection of plants in
the two books, the Paradisus and Theatrum, is
really a wonderful collection, and his descriptions
of them are given in strong vigorous English which
leaves nothing to be desired. Take his description
of the seed vessels of the Pceony, which I have
just named ; first, however, taking a modern
botanical description of the plant, "Follicles 2-5,
downy recurved, with many seeds and covered

76

The Garden under Snow

with the bilamellated stigmas." This is quite
accurate, but Parkinson gives us an exact
portrait : —

"The seed vessels are divided into two, three, or four
rough crooked pods like homes, which, when they are full
ripe, open and turn themselves down one edge to another
backwards, showing within them divers round black shining
seeds, which are the true seed, being full and good, and
having also many red or crimson grains, which are lanck
and idle, intermixed among the black, as if they were good
seed, whereby it maketh a very pretty show."

I should like to stay longer with Parkinson, but
space forbids, and there are many other writers of
the same date all worth consulting, if only to see
the flowers that were then most grown and prized ;
but there is rather a monotony among them, and
they are all to some extent spoiled by the large
admixture of medical virtues which it was then
thought necessary to give in the description of
every plant. It was the fashion of the times ; if
a plant had no medical virtue, it was scarcely
thought to be worth growing, and so too often the
virtues were invented, and were chiefly grounded
on the then fashionable doctrine of signatures.
The same desire to force all botany into the
service of medicine was shown in the practice of
calling botanic gardens physic gardens. The fine
old garden at Oxford was so called within the
memory of many of us, and the Chelsea Garden
still later.

In the early part of the seventeenth century a
77

In My Vicarage Garden

grand style of flower-books became the fashion,
chiefly in France and Holland. The books were
simply picture-books, but the plates were beauti-
fully engraved on copper, from perfect drawings,
the flowers being often of the natural size. I
allude to such books as the Theatrum Florcz,
Florilegium Renovatum, Jardin du Roy, and above
all the Campi Elysii, which I have already named.
These are fine folios, but there are some others of
a smaller size, such as the Hortus Floridus, with
exquisite engravings by Crispin de Paas'of flowers
arranged in their seasons. But I will say no more
of these beautiful books, as I wish to confine my-
self to English works ; but every lover of flowers
would do well not to let any opportunity slip of
securing these books.

There are two very special pleasures in looking
through old books of flowers. One is the pleasure
of finding that, except in really very few instances,
the same flowers which now delight us were the
delight of our fathers and grandfathers. It is
almost amusing to read of prizes and first-class
certificates being given to plants as novelties,
which may be found well figured in the old books.
The Campi Elysii is a case in point. There is no
reason to suspect the absolute fidelity of the plates,
and there are narcissi there equal to or better than
any of the fine ones which have been produced in
late years as novelties ; and in the same book
there are many others which are quite lost to us.
Another pleasure is the recalling to our memory

78

The Garden under Snow

good plants which we ourselves have had and lost.
As I look through the Botanical Magazine, or the
Botanical Register, or Sweet's Flower Garden, I
recognise many a flower which I once had and
prized, and which perhaps I may never have
again ; but having once had it, I look with double
pleasure on the old plate that recalls it. And I
knew one good old gardener who loved to tell of
the so-called yellow cabbage rose x which when he
was young grew upon his vicarage walls ; and
though he lived to a good old age he never saw
the plant again ; but whenever he saw the plate
in the Botanical Register it all came back to him
with something perhaps of regret, but still more
with pleasant memories.

Thankful as I am for books at all times, I feel
doubly thankful for them in such a winter as this.
I am afraid we are all of us too much inclined to
say with Shakespeare's Archbishop Scroop, " Past
and to come seem best, things present worst,"
but there is no doubt the present winter is so far
one of the worst on record. Shakespeare gives
us the proverb, " As humorous as winter," and we
know what he means ; but in this winter there
are no " fitful humours ; " it is one unbroken
spell of snow and ice. For three weeks I have
not seen the green grass of my lawn, and I fear
the effects in the garden must be disastrous. Yet
there are gleams of hope. The fine autumn had
well ripened the wood of all shrubs, and the deep

i R. hemisphserica,

79

In My Vicarage Garden

snow has protected the herbaceous and bulbous
plants, and the frost has come early, before plants
had started into new life. And of course the ice
and snow have their uses even to the gardener.
If he loses some plants, he will have some pleasant
surprises in the survival of others, and if he is
watchful and careful he may learn much of the
effects of frost and how to guard against it ; and
so he may be taught many a useful lesson, though
he learn it per damna, per ccedes. We have been
spoiled by a succession of mild winters, and were
becoming too venturesome. The check has now
come, and for the time it is very unpleasant, and
the effects may be woeful ; but we shall not there-
fore give up our gardens in despair : —

" Deus haec fortasse benigna
Reducet in sedem vice."

80

CHAPTER X

THE ROCK GARDEN

PERSONS going to the Alps, and seeing plants
growing there in what look like uncongenial places,
and then bringing them home and planting them
in their good soil and sheltered gardens, are apt
to think that they have done all that is necessary
to have at home the bright colours and the vigour
of Alpine plants which they so much admired in
Switzerland. No doubt they have done all they
could, but the end is not far off. In new gardens
especially, plants sometimes put on a marvellous
luxuriance, and we are tempted to think that we
shall succeed, and even do better for our favourites
than in their native homes ; but it does not last
long. Little by little they dwindle away, smothered
by weeds or by seedlings from their neighbours,
and the end is that many of us have to confess
that Alpines from the higher Alps cannot be
grown except in a few favoured places or under
glass. And this is not only the case with the
plants of the high Alps ; it is equally the case
with many other Swiss plants. I cannot grow
the Arnica montana ; but has any one ever seen
it in England growing with anything approaching
F 81

In My Vicarage Garden

to the luxuriance of growth and brilliancy of colour
that it has in Switzerland in July and August?
The Astrantia minor covers the rocks and short
grass in many places in Switzerland, but I never
knew any one who had really succeeded with it
in England. Even the Campanula barbata, which
covers acres and acres with its lovely blossoms at
many different elevations, will do well enough for
two or three seasons, and then will gradually dis-
appear. The fact is, as I suppose, that we can
easily give our plants the soil they require, but we
cannot give them the climate and atmosphere ;
and climate and atmosphere are of as much im-
portance to their well-being as carefully selected
soil.

But the title of my paper is the Rock Garden,
and the growth of Alpines is with most people
closely connected with rockeries ; yet I wish to
speak of them not only or chiefly in connection
with Alpines, but with many other plants. I do
not entirely agree with those who say that nothing
is uglier than a rockery, for I have seen many
which were not only beautiful in themselves, but
beautiful and most useful additions to beautiful
gardens. But there are also many, and perhaps
the majority, which are absolutely hideous, but
even so they are, or may be, useful, and in some
form or other every one who wishes to grow a
good collection of plants must have them, for in
no other way, generally speaking, can he get the
protection, the shade without darkness, and the

82

The Rock Garden

uniform moisture that many plants love. Perhaps
the best way in which I give my own ideas as
to what a rock garden should be will be by first
stating what it should not be ; when a person
clearly knows what to avoid he has more than
half learned the lesson of success.

The rock garden should never be near the
house ; it must always more or less partake of
savagery and wildness, and so is quite out of
harmony with studied lines of architecture. And
yet the most successful rock garden I have known
was close to a house in the suburbs of Worthing.
The house is the ordinary suburban villa, with a
slip of garden in front, and behind the house
another garden of the same width as the house,
and about double the depth. The whole of this
space is filled with what I can only liken to a
miniature meadow in front of but rather below
the windows of the house, and surrounded with
what looks like the entrance to a small Derbyshire
dale. Not a portion of the boundary walls can be
seen behind the rocks which have been formed
out of the rubbish of old houses pulled down in
the neighbourhood, and piled up and covered with
flowers and shrubs by the almost unaided labour
of an old lady and gentleman, both over fourscore.
The naturalness of the scene was complete. In
no part could you see anything that suggests that
it is all artificial, and it is a grand proof of what
can be done out of the most unpromising materials,
if there is only skill and enthusiasm. But this is

83

In My Vicarage Garden

an entirely exceptional case ; the usual suburban
villa is not complete without its rockwork, and the
rockwork is almost always a triumph of ugliness.
The usual process is to make near the front door
a heap of earth of some regular shape, generally
oval, four or five feet high, and to place stones of
different sorts, spar for preference, at equal dis-
tances all over the heap. The likeness to a cake
studded with almonds is complete, and the initial
error is the erection of the rockwork rising out of
level surroundings, and wherever the ground is
level round a rockwork its artificial character is
at once revealed. A still worse form of rock
garden finds great favour with the suburban
gardener, and this is to cover a bed with blocks
of stone, or coloured glass scoriae, if he can get
them, placed at equal distances all over the surface.
I saw such a bed once at Southsea, quite bare
except for large blocks of coarse coke placed care-
fully on the surface with mathematical accuracy.
Nature is very generous in hiding anything that
is ugly, and filling up every vacuum, but she will
find it hard to change such a bed as that into a
thing of beauty ; and I once saw near Chester a
noted rock garden of really good design, and one
on which much money and labour had been spent,
but which was completely spoiled by too great
neatness and trimness. Not only was every shrub
carefully clipped, but every stone was twice a year
thoroughly scrubbed and scraped, so that though
it was more than twenty years old when I saw it

84

The Rock Garden

it looked as if made yesterday ; nature and time
had done all they could to soften its hardness and
to clothe its bare surfaces, but the gardener was
able to defy them. So here is another rule — to
avoid everything that suggests artifice, or even to
suggest man's labour. Of course there must be
artifice and there must be human labour, but they
should be kept out of sight as much as possible.

There is another form of the rock garden which
must be noticed ; for it is very scientific and very
ugly. This is the pocketed garden, which was first
started by Mr M'Nab at the Edinburgh Botanic
Gardens about thirty years ago. It consists of a
collection of squares placed side by side, and one
above the other, the sides of the squares being
formed of thin flat stones, of which two-thirds at
least are below the surface of the soil. When Mr
M'Nab first showed it to me I was bound to con-
fess that I had never before seen anything in
garden work quite so ugly ; it suggested nothing
so much as a gigantic counter in a corn exchange
for the display of samples. But at the same time
I was bound also to confess that it would pro-
bably be a great success for the cultivation of
plants, especially Alpines ; for it gave such plants
just what they require, shelter from the extreme
heat and glow of the sun, separation from other
plants which would choke them, and a moist, cool
surface for the roots to run in without fear of
stagnant water. The result has shown that Mr
M'Nab was right ; the plants have done excel-

85

In My Vicarage Garden

lently well, and as they have been allowed to go
their own way they have covered up the hard
angles and hidden the ugly stones, and so it has
been an undoubted success, and excellently suited
to a botanic garden, but to no other. I should
be sorry to see it much imitated ; the principle of
pockets with deeply sunk stones behind which the
plants can find shelter from sun and wind can be
easily adopted without converting the garden into
a gigantic chess-board.

What, then, will make a rockwork which will
form a happy home for plants, and be at the same
time beautiful in itself and a beautiful adjunct to
a garden ? I have already said that a rockwork
which rises above the level of a flat surface at
once proclaims itself to be artificial ; on a sloping
ground, especially if very steep, rocks may natur-
ally crop out, and will be useful to keep up the
soil, and they are very natural borders to a path
at the bottom of sloping ground ; and a very
little management will give plenty of good places
for plants near such rocks. In many gardens
there is an old quarry from which the stones were
taken for the building of the house ; and these
always make excellent rock gardens, being below
the surrounding garden, with different levels, and
generally with a good floor, more or less flat, and
sometimes sufficiently moist to form a bog garden.
I think it best that a rock garden should not be
seen till you are immediately above it or in it ;
one that obtrudes itself from a distance is in every

86

The Rock Garden

way a mistake, and the best rock garden I have
known was a disused slate quarry in a small wood
in a very good garden near Plymouth. It was
quite invisible till you were actually in it, and then
the disintegrated crumbling slate, through which
there was a dripping of water, made a very para-
dise for ferns, and not for ferns only, but for many
other good plants that loved shade and moisture.
This is the secret of the success of the rock
garden at Kew. The surface of Kew Gardens is
almost a dead level, but when the time came to
make a large rock garden, it was wisely deter-
mined not to place on the level a huge mountain
of stones, but the happy thought was acted on to
imitate the dried-up bed of a stream through a
rocky soil, of which the banks would form the
rock garden. The exigencies of a public botanical
garden forced them to do some things that it
would not be well to imitate, e.g. the wide gravel
walk in the centre, while the flatness of the surface
obliged them to show a flat bed to the stream ; if
they could have had this on a gentle slope, and if
they could also have made some side-paths lead-
ing into it, as if they were connected rivulets, the
effect would have been better, and they would
have had a greater variety of aspects ; still it is a
decided success, and, having a liberal supply of
water, they are able to keep it always fresh, and
the plants look thoroughly comfortable.

There is one form of rock garden (if we may
so call it) which I think might be often used with

In My Vicarage Garden

great effect. I have already written on garden
walls,1 but I did not mention that in many
gardens, especially where the surface is flat, a
dwarf wall, built of large stones unmortared, but
rilled with earth in the interstices, and with
earthen tops, will make an excellent home for
many good plants, and though it will of course
look artificial, it need not look ugly or out of place.
The Cornish walls will give a good idea for such
walls, and it is the common way of growing plants
in the gardens of Portugal, and other parts of
South Europe and North Africa. In Mr Craw-
ford's charming book, Through the Calendar in
Portugal, after telling us how the Portuguese love
flowers, but despise trimness, florists' flowers, or
novelty in flowers, and only ask for vigorous
growth, rich colour, and sweet scent, he describes
the distinguishing feature of the Portuguese
garden : —

" A survival of the old Moorish times is the wall running
by the garden paths faced with painted tiles. Along the top
of the low wall is scooped a deep furrow to be filled with
garden mould, and planted mostly with carnations, pinks,
and gilliflowers, or the dwarf scented purple iris of Portugal.
All these plants like the drought, and so set the flowers can
be plucked or smelled to without bending the back — an
ingenious device of the ease-loving Oriental."

In the rock garden don't be afraid of shrubs,
not only dwarf shrubs, but tall and large ones ;
nothing will more help to give it a natural ap-

1 Gloucestershire Garden, p. 203.
88

The Rock Garden

pearance, and to hide what is artificial ; and
among shrubs I am fond of yuccas for such a
place, they naturally grow among rocks, and they
look well, whether placed at the extreme top, or
in any other part. But avoid all root-work ; it
looks rather well at first, but it soon becomes a
harbour for vermin of all kinds, and as it rots
away it very seriously disarranges the whole of
the garden, however carefully it may have been
put together. Avoid also all such things as frag-
ments of old buildings, old pinnacles, bits of
Gothic windows, and, above all, such things as
plaster casts, glass balls, glass scoriae, or any other
scoriae, statuettes, and such like, and if you must
have labels (and they are almost unavoidable) have
them as inconspicuous as possible ; all such things
(except the labels) suggest that the whole thing is
a sham, and the more natural and wild the rock
garden can be made, the better. For this reason
I would, if possible, use only one kind of stone,
and place the stones, if I could, in their natural
positions. All this will involve labour and thought,
and doubtless many a good rock garden has been
made in a more haphazard manner. I am only
giving a counsel of perfection, and much good
work may be done without reaching to that.

Nothing is uglier than many rockeries, perhaps
the majority of them, but I contend that they are
necessities in a good garden, and that they need
not be ugly, and may be made quite beautiful ;
and so I am more inclined to agree — or rather

89

In My Vicarage Garden

I do entirely agree — with Ellwanger in the Garden
Story : —

" Of all forms of cultivating flowers, rock-gardening is the
most interesting. Within a small space you may grow in-
numerable dainty plants, which would be swallowed up or
would not thrive in the border — delicate Alpines, little
creeping vines, cool mosses, rare orchids, and much of the
miniature and charming flora of the woods and mountains."

90

CHAPTER XI

YORK AND LANCASTER ROSES

THERE are many roses with variegated petals,
but two only rank as York and Lancaster roses.
The others I dismiss at once, for though Mr
Rivers speaks favourably of Village Maid or La
Villageoise, CEillet Parfait, Perle des Panache"es,
and Tricolor de Flandres, they have never
obtained a footing in English gardens, and from
my own experience of them I should not think
it likely that they ever will. I shall confine my
remarks, therefore, to the two kinds which are
best known, and it will be better to begin with
the description of them, and then to say some-
thing of their history and literary associations.

Of the two kinds one has certainly been known
in England more than three hundred years. It
is a variety of Rosa Damascena, but its old name
was R. versicolor. It is an upright rose, often
growing six feet high, and in good seasons bear-
ing a large number of semi-double roses, of which
some are white, some are pink, and some white
and pink combined. The flowers are not large,
but it is a very pretty rose, very hardy, and can be
increased by cuttings or suckers ; it produces a

In My Vicarage Garden

few red pear-shaped hips, and I believe, though
I have never tried, that it comes true from seed.
It is not a very common rose now, though I fancy
it was fairly common in old English gardens, but
it has been supplanted by the more showy rose,
which I call the second sort of the true York and
Lancaster roses. This is a variety of Rosa
G allica, but I have not been able to find any
account of its introduction into England, and it
is generally said to have been first raised in
England, but of this there is no certain proof, but
it seems to have been chiefly noticed by English
writers. I can find no earlier notice than in
Gilbert's Florists' Vade Mecum, 1682 — an ex-
cellent little book. His description seems to
imply that neither the rose nor the name were
novelties at that time. He describes it thus : —

" Rosa Mundi, the Rose of the World for Scent and form
like the common red one, but the colours differ to admira-
tion, were it not by its great increasing grown too common,
are in this flower for the most part of a pale flush-colour,
diversely spotted, and finely marked with great flakes of the
same red as in the common red Rose, making it through the
double flower the loveliest thing to eye of its species " (p. 77).

It was well figured by Miller in 1758 as Rosa
Prcznestina variegataflore pleno\ by Miss Lawrence
in 1796 as Rosa Mundi\ and in the Botanical
Magazine in 1 8 1 6 as Rosa Gallica versicolor or
R. Mundi. All these names are certainly wrong ;
there can be nothing to connect the York and
Lancaster rose with Pliny's roses of Prceneste, of

92

York and Lancaster Roses

which he gives no description, but Clusius doubt-
fully gave the name to the older form, and Miller
adopted his name for the later one ; Rosa Mundi
was also Ray's name for the older form ; and
Rosa versicolor was also Parkinson's name for the
same rose. The name now generally accepted is
Rosa Mundi, and as it is so figured in the Botanical
Magazine p, it is better that that name should be
given to the more modern, reserving the name
of R. versicolor for the older one. By whatever
botanical name it may be called, its popular name
will always be York and Lancaster, and it well
deserves the name, its bold mixture of bright red
and pure white making it very conspicuous and
attractive. A few years ago it was very scarce,
and could only be found in a few old-fashioned
gardens, having been pushed aside by the hybrid
perpetuals ; but now that a love for the old-
fashioned flowers has revived, it has been again
brought forward, and promises to be as popular
as ever. It has an untidy habit, but it is very
hardy, and increases freely by suckers, which are
apt sometimes to come up a long distance from
the parent plant, but it is not easy to strike from
cuttings, and I am told that it is very difficult to
increase by budding. In some years it produces
abundance of hips and seed. I have never sown
any, for I have been credibly informed that not
more than one in a hundred will come true. Of
the history and literary association of this rose I
have nothing more to say ; but in the history

93

In My Vicarage Garden

of the other there are some very interesting
points.

It would be very interesting if we could find
out when this rose first appeared in England.
There is no certain record of it, but I am inclined
to think that it was not seen in English gardens
before the latter part of the sixteenth century.
Before that time all roses are described as either
red or white. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, in the
fourteenth century, distinctly says that all English
roses were so, entirely red or very white (omnino
rubra vel omnino albissima) ; and this is curiously
shown by the fact that in all the descriptions of
female beauty before that time the pink of the
face and lips is always derived from the rose, but
the white from the lily, but after that time the
variegated rose is naturally used (as by Shake-
speare) for the more perfect similitude. The only
poet or writer, as far as I know, that mentions
the red and white rose earlier than Shakespeare
is the Scotch poet, Dunbar, who wrote at the end
of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth
century, and he says : —

Nor hold none other flower in sic dainty
As the fresh rose of color red and white.

Dunbar was a traveller, and may have seen the
rose in foreign countries, but I think it doubtful,
and think the " rose of color red and white " may
mean red and white roses, and not red and white
in one rose. But towards the end of the century

94

York and Lancaster Roses

the rose must have been well known and popular.
Shakespeare decides this, for he certainly mentions
the rose three if not four times : —

For flesh and blood, sir, white and red, you shall see a
rose ; and she were a rose indeed.

Pericles^ Act iv. sc. 6.

The roses fearfully in thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair ;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both,
And to his robbery had annexed thy breath.

Sonnet xcix.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks.

Sonnet cxxx.

More white and red than dove and roses are.

Venus and Adonis^ iv.

Pericles was probably only written in part by
Shakespeare, but whether by him or a contem-
porary it matters little to my present purpose —
i.e. to fix a date for the introduction of the rose.
The sonnets were published in 1609, but probably
written at least ten years earlier.1

I may now go to the botanists. The first
description of the rose is by Clusius, in 1601.
I omit his botanical description that I may find
place for Parkinson's, but he tells us that he first

1 To these passages may perhaps be added the whole scene in
the Temple Garden, I Henry VI., Act ii. sc. 4. The text will
quite bear the interpretation that the different white and red roses
were all plucked from the same " thorn " or " briar."

95

In My Vicarage Garden

heard of it from John Restan, of Cologne, in
1600, and had a plant from him, but it had not
flowered. He gave it, however, the name of
R. versicolor, which it has since retained. Gerard
does not mention it at all in 1597, nor is it
mentioned by Johnson, the editor of the second
edition in 1633, so it is probable it was not much
known in England then. But in 1656 Parkinson
described it, and his description is so good that
I am tempted to quote the greater part of it :—

The flower (being of the same largenesse and doublenesse
as the damaske rose) hath the one half of it sometimes of a
pale whitish colour, and the other half of a paler damaske
colour than the ordinary ; this happeneth so many times,
and sometimes also the flower hath divers stripes and
markes in it, as one leaf white, or striped with white, and
the other half blush or striped with blush, and sometimes
all striped or spotted over, and other times little or no
stripes or marks at all, as nature liketh to play with varieties
in this as in other flowers.

But if I am puzzled to say when the flower
first came into English gardens, it is still more
difficult to say when it first got its excellent
name of York and Lancaster Rose. Hoffman,
in his excellent Lexicon, 1698, after describing
the Wars of the Roses, says that on tfte union
of the two houses a double red and white rose
formed part of the English Royal insignia, but
he gives no authority for the statement, and I
do not remember to have seen it elsewhere ; but
if it was so it would be natural to call the new
rose after the existing insignia, and it would be

York and Lancaster Roses

a natural and obvious compliment for the courtiers
of the time of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth to say
how Nature had shown the excellence of the union
of the houses of York and Lancaster by joining
in one fair flower the white rose of the one to
the red rose of the other. But the first notice
I can find is in the heading to Parkinson's de-
scription, just quoted, " Rosa Versicolor : The
Party-coloured Rose, of some York and Lan-
caster." This shows that the name was a com-
mon name in Parkinson's time, and was not
invented by him. About the same time Cleve-
land, the poet, wrote : —

Her cheeks

Where roses mix ; no civil war
Between her York and Lancaster.

I can get no nearer to the origin of the name
than this. It was probably a chance name happily
chosen, which at once took the public fancy,
and so has remained with us. I will finish my
paper with an epigram which is well known, but
is clever enough to bear repetition : —

If this pale rose offend your sight

Laid in thy bosom bare ;
'Twill blush to find itself less white,

And turn Lancastrian there.

But if thy ruby lip it spy,

And kiss it thou may'st deign,
With envy pale 'twill lose its dye,

And Yorkist turn again.

G 97

CHAPTER XII
PLANT NAMES

PLANTS must have names, and most of the
names which are now so fixed have gone through
many changes, and I do not intend to tell how
they have changed and how they have become
finally fixed. That has been done by many
writers on botany, and can be well studied in a
small compass in Professor Earle's excellent little
book on English Plant Names, in the Introduc-
tion to which he gives the account of the progress
of plant-naming from Theophrastus to Linnaeus
and Jussieu. What I rather wish to do is to show
that however unattractive at first sight the study
of plant names (I mean their scientific, botanical
names) may be, there is in them a fund of instruc-
tion and interest which will well repay the labour
spent upon them. That there must be such
names, joined or not with popular English names,
is an absolute necessity in botany, as in every
other science ; for " the first necessity for science,"
says Professor Earle, " was to know the objects,
and to know them by their names." In botany
these names are certainly very often long and
cumbrous, uncouth and unclassical, and to many

98

Plant Names

who use them they can convey no meaning at all,
and I have often listened with wonder to men
and women with no classical education whatever,
and without the slightest knowledge of Greek or
Latin, using a multitude of these long words
(sesquipedalia verba), and using them accurately
and, in many cases, with a real knowledge of
their meaning, though with no knowledge of their
derivation ; in such cases, their use of these words
shows a wonderful power of memory, which is no
way helped by tracing the fitness of the name for
the plant.

There is now, and there always has been, a
desire to use for plants popular names only, and
the long scientific names have been mercilessly
held up to ridicule, and have given occasion for
many harmless jokes. Yet it is not easy to see
why botany should have been so specially singled
out for abuse and ridicule of its scientific names,
except that perhaps the study of gardening and
botany is the most popular of the sciences, and is
followed up by a larger number of half-educated
people. Rocks and stones, butterflies and moths,
and especially birds, are as much common objects
of the country as trees and flowers, and the
different sciences of geology, entomology, and
ornithology make use of scientific words not only
as difficult to understand as the scientific names
of plants, but much more difficult, because there
is not the same connection between the names
and the objects that there is in botany ; and yet

99

In My Vicarage Garden

in these sciences the names are not laughed at,
nor any attempts made to do without them in
common use. Take the case of entomology, and
especially that part of it which deals with butter-
flies and moths, probably the most popular part —
certainly the part that is first taken up by young
people. Many of these have popular English
names, and some of them are fairly descriptive of
the insects, but the collector is soon taught to
ignore them, and to keep steadily to the scientific
names ; and when he does so he must be often
puzzled to find any reason for the names given,
or to trace any connection between the name and
the thing. I take up the Accentuated List of the
British Lepidoptera, and in the first page I find
the following names of butterflies : — Pieris, a muse ;
Daphlidoce, one of the daughters of Danaus ;
Colias, a surname of Venus ; Edusa, a Roman
divinity ; Hyale, a nymph in the train of Diana ;
Argyunis, a surname of Venus, etc. Such names
can give the student no information about the
nature of the butterflies so named, or induce him
to try and find out from the names something of
the history of the insects. In botany the case is
quite different. I believe it would be hard to find
among plants a single plant name that had not
a meaning ; in every plant name, not only the
specific, but the generic name as well, there is
something that tells of the history of the plant,
either its discoverer, or its native place, or its
structure, or its appearance as distinguished from

100

Plant Names

its near relatives. And it is this history which,
as I contend, lifts the most forbidding-looking
botanical names from their apparent uselessness
and dryness, and gives them an interest which
adds largely to the other interests of the garden.

I can illustrate what I mean by a few examples,
taken partly from the native plants, and partly
from exotics. The greater number of the names
of our native plants have been adopted from the
oldest writers. In some cases, no doubt, they
have been given to very different plants than those
of the old writers, but always with good reasons ;
but it would be too long a task to enter into this
part of the subject. What I want to show is how
every name draws our attention to some peculiarity
in the particular plant which distinguishes it from
all others. Take our meadow cranesbills, very
common in many parts of England, and of a rich
blue colour that is not surpassed by any. There
are three families closely allied — the geranium
and the erodium of our own country, and the
pelargonium chiefly of the Cape, and entirely so
but for one curious outlier in Asia Minor (P.
Endlicherianum] and two in New Zealand. The
three names are all pure Greek — yifxvjog the crane,
spudios the heron, and crsXa^yog the stork, and they
all three at once draw our attention to the long
sharp-pointed seed-vessels so closely resembling
the long, sharp bills of the crane, the heron, and
the stork. Having got so far, the specific names
point out to us how one differs from another :
101

In My Vicarage Garden

that one is phoewn^ or dark-flowered, while another
is sanguineum with red flowers ; one is sylvaticum,
of the woods, another pratense of the meadows, a
third maritimum of the seashore, and a fourth
Pyrenaeum, having its headquarters in the Pyrenees,
while the structure is shown in one, being Nodosum,
with knotty joints, and another Rotundifolium
with round leaves, and so on. This will show
what I mean from our native plants ; in exotic
plants the scientific names often tell us a great
deal of the geography or discovery of the plant,
and so often give valuable help to the cultivator.
If he gets a plant having for its specific name
Javanicun, Brasiliensis, Benghalensis, Madagas-
carensis, Aethiopica, etc., he knows at once that it
is a tropical plant, which can only be grown in
a hothouse ; if it is labelled Chilensis, Chiloensis,
Magellanica, Mexicana, Capensis, or Novae Zea-
landiae, he knows at once that it is probably half
hardy, and may be worth trying as a hardy plant ;
if the specific name is Japonica, Siberica^ Tartarica,
CanadensiS) borealis, or Arctica, he has little scruple
in trusting it out-of-doors, being well assured of
its hardness, though for some mysterious reason it
may defy cultivation in England ; if the name
is Htmalaica ^Atlantica^ Caucasica^ Alpina, or mon-
tana, he knows at once that it comes from a high
elevation, and must be treated accordingly to the
best of his powers ; while on the other hand he
will reject a plant which reveals its low level
nature by the names paludosus, lacustris, aquatica,

102

Plant Names

or hydrophilon, unless he can give it a pond or a
bog. He will get the same help when a plant
bears the name of its discoverers if he has any
knowledge of the travellers ; a plant named
Douglassii is sure to come from California,
Wallichei from the Himalayas, Sieboldi or
Fortuni from Japan or China. In these different
ways I contend that a knowledge of the scientific
names will tell much that is useful to know, and
so will add largely to the interest and pleasure of
the garden.

Nor is this all. Many of the scientific names,
especially the older names, contain much of
history and folk-lore. A large number still
preserve their old medical names, which pointed
out to the student for what complaint he was to
use them, though they may no longer be so used
now. The paronychia was a cure for the whitlow,
and Herniaria for ruptures ; aegopodium podagraria
would be administered for the gout, and Campanula
trachelium for a sore throat. Old folk-lore is
preserved in a large number of names, but two or
three will suffice. Morsus diaboli preserves the
old legend that to destroy the wonderful effects
of the plant the Evil One bit off the root ;
Carduus benedictus claims by its name to have
received a special blessing which gave it the
virtues of a heal-all ; while the passiflora, or flos
passionis, recalls the story of the old missionary's
joy in finding in heathen lands a beautiful flower
in which he could discover all the emblems of the
103

In My Vicarage Garden

Passion. One extreme instance will show that
even in our own times a name may be given which
in time to come will perpetuate the history of a
savage custom now happily passed away. In the
Fiji Islands there grows a solanum (very like our
tomato) which has obtained the ghastly name of
solanum anthropophagum. As long as the name
lasts it will tell the story that the Fijians were
once cannibals, and grew this vegetable specially
for their cannibal feasts, human flesh being,
according to the reports of Dr Leeman and
Professor Moseley, very unwholesome unless eaten
with certain vegetables, grown for the purpose, of
which the solanum was in most request. The
Fijians are no longer cannibals, but that they
were so once will always be told by this plant.

I would then recommend to all lovers of a
garden to learn all they can of the scientific
names of their favourites, just as I would recom-
mend them to learn all they can of their structure,
their botanical affinities, and their geography, for
the simple reason that the more they learn the
more they will wish to learn, and the more they
will find to study with loving admiration. But it
does not follow from this that I think lightly of
the common English names of our plants. Our
old English names are full of a special charm,
and I have always delighted not only to trace
them through our literature, but to preserve them
in every possible way, and to use them in pre-
ference to any others. They will make for any

104

Plant Names

one a separate study by themselves, and a very
delightful study, and the many books which have
been written about them show what a fascination
they have had even for great scholars. I doubt
if there is anything in our English country life,
or in our English home life, which has come
down to us so unchanged as our common plant
names. Professor Earle, in his English Plant
Names, extracted all the names given in the
glossaries from the tenth to the fifteenth century.
Since that the Epinal Glossary, supposed to be
of the beginning of the eighth century, has been
published. In this glossary there are 123 names
of plants, of which a few have no English trans-
lation ; but there are more than ninety in which
the old English names are exactly the same as
the names of the present day ; so that we may
say that for more than 1 200 years the names have
remained unchanged. During the last few years
attempts have been made largely to increase the
number of English names for exotic plants, and
even to insist that none but English names should
be used by English botanists. I have no wish to
enter into the discussion of this vexed question ;
I will only say that I think the attempt is both
unwise and mischievous, and if adopted by other
nations would lead to a woeful confusion, and,
instead of knowing our plants by the one accepted
scientific name which would be good in every
civilised nation, we should have to learn the
different names adopted in each separate country.
105

In My Vicarage Garden

Baron von Mueller, the energetic Government
botanist for Victoria, in his account of tropical
plants useful in manufactures, etc., has given good
reasons against this. In writing the book he says
that—

" Vernaculars have been but sparingly used, being so often
of duplicity or even multiplicity in their application, and so
frequently also misleading. We should strive to simplify
nomenclature, and should reduce popular names to such
solitary and logical expressions as most readily can be under-
stood in each instance. Thus it is as easy to say Casuarinas
as the very objectionable appellations Sheoak and Heoak."

I know that there are some, but not many, I
should think, who profess to love flowers, but
who say they care nothing for the names, whether
English, Latin, or Greek. They will quote from
Shakespeare that " a rose by any other name
would smell as sweet," or Tennyson's description
of the baronet's garden, in which —

" Flowers of all hue and lovelier than their names
Grew side by side."

With such I have no sympathy ; it is a real
pleasure to me, and I know it is to many others
who are not only botanists, but good garden
masters, to hunt up the history of a plant name ;
to trace it from Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and
Pliny till I get the helping hand of Gaspar
Banhin, who in the seventeenth century sum-
marised for me in his great Pinex Theatri Botanici
all the names that had gone before ; and then
Miller, in his Gardener's Dictionary, will do much

106

Plant Names

to fill up the gap between Caspar Banhin and the
nineteenth century. I should, indeed, like to go
back further than Theophrastus, for plants must
always have had names, and I should like to
know where they are first mentioned.1 I suppose
the earliest names in the Bible would be those in
the Book of Job, and I have been told that very
old Egyptian names have been discovered, but I
am very ignorant of Egyptian literature. The
earliest distinct mention that I have found of the
use of plant names in a garden is in the Odyssey.
When Ulysses is making himself known to
Laertes, who in his doubts asks for some sign,
he very simply tells him that he will show him
in his garden the trees that he gave him as a
boy, and at the same time taught him their
names : —

'Ei 5' $76 TOi Kal dtvdpa }^vKrL/j.evr}v KCLT
eiTrw a yu,ot irbr £5«Kas, ^yw 5' -fjreov <re

e<j)V Kara Krjirov eVta'7r6/u,€J'os' 5ta 5' avruv
, av 5' wj'6/iaa'as Kal eeiTres efcacrra.

— xxiv., 335-338.

" I'll tell you, too, the trees (in goodly frame
Of this fair orchard) that I askt of you
Being yet a child, and followed, for your show
And name of every tree." — Chapmarfs Translation.

1 We are told that " Adam gave names to all cattle and to the
fowl of the air and to every beast of the field " ; but according to
Milton the naming of the flowers of Eden fell to Eve ;

"O flowers,

Which I bred up with tender hand
From the first opening bud, and gave ye names."

— Paradise Lost, xi. 277.
107

CHAPTER XIII

THE SCENTS OF FLOWERS

THERE can be no doubt that the whole subject
of flower scents is a very interesting one, and that
no botanical student can altogether leave it out of
his studies. The subject, so far as it concerns the
perfumer only, was well treated of by M. Eugene
Rimmel, in his Le Livre des Parfumes^ published
in 1870, with an introduction by Alphonse Karr,
and an enlargement of The Book of Perfumes,
published in 1860 ; and the same subject from the
same point of view has been thoroughly worked
out by Mr J. C. Sawer in his Odorograpkia, 1892,
1894, and his Rhodologia, 1894. But there is a
great deal more strictly botanical connected with
flower scents on which there is much to be said,
and a great deal also which we can only call
unsolved mystery.

The scientific and botanical interest range round
the question, "What is the use of scent in plants?"
It is not many years since this question would
have been answered at once, and without the
slightest hesitation. The answer would have been
that owing to their delicate scent plants became
more pleasant food to all the animals that feed

1 08

The Scents of Flowers

upon them, and still more, that the scents were
a delight to man, and for that purpose especially
they were created. To think otherwise would
have been considered heresy and unbelief; by a
distortion of the text which gave to man " Every
green herb of the field for meat," it was argued
that the ultimate object of every part of every
green herb of the field was to fit it for the food or
for the delight of man. We now think differently,
and give our answer as boldly. While we thank-
fully acknowledge that the beauty of flowers, their
scents and flavour add largely to our enjoyment
of them, we say now without hesitation that it is
not for us especially that the beauty, scents, and
flavours of flowers have been produced. Our
present creed is that every colour and every
shade of colour in a flower, every arrangement
of cell, root, fibre, stamens, pistils, calyx, corolla,
etc., all and each have the one object of perfecting
the life of the plant, and helping it to reproduce
itself. And if this is true of other parts of the
plant it must be true of the scents. In some way
or other the scents must be an essential part of
the life of the plant ; they must perform some
special duty which nothing else could perform.
And in speaking of the scents of plants and their
function in the life of the plant, it will not do to
confine our research to sweet scents ; for it is quite
certain that evil scents — evil, that is, to us — are as
essentially necessary to the plants in which they are
found as rich, pleasant scents are to other flowers.
109

In My Vicarage Garden

Speaking generally it is now assumed, and
by many is supposed to be proved, that scents,
especially sweet scents, attract moths and other
insects whose help is necessary to the perfecting
of the plant, while evil scents help — like thorns,
prickles, and stings — to keep away animals,
especially browsing animals, from plants which
would thus be destroyed. This may explain
some small portion of the uses of scents to the
plants, but it is far from explaining all ; it gives
no explanation, for instance, of those cases where
the scent is only found in the roots, or in the
seed, nor of the cases where the scent is very
strong in the leaves, and where the flower does
not require insect agency as in the lemon-scented
verbena ; nor of the hundreds of cases of exotic
plants grown in England, where the scent is very
powerful, but the plants never produce seed. And
though this explanation is often spoken of as one
of the discoveries of modern science, it is not so ;
it is at least as old as Lucretius ; though his
explanation refers more to the food of the animals
than of the plants :

" Aliis alius nidor datus ad sua quemque
Pabula ducit, et a tetro resilire veneno
Cogit ; eoque modo servantur secla ferarum."

De Rer. Nat. iv. 687.

Lucretius was so fond of giving examples of
natural objects that supported his theories that
it is a pity he did not give us examples from his
own observations of plants whose scents either

no

The Scents of Flowers

attracted or warned off different animals, but he
did not do so. There is no difficulty in finding
hundreds of examples, and the common buttercup
is as good an instance as any of the way in which
animals are warned from dangerous plants by this
very acute sense of smell. To us the scent of a
buttercup is almost imperceptible, but to the cow
the scent is sufficiently strong to protect the plant
from being eaten. It is most curious to examine
a field full of buttercups in which cows are grazing.
In some years the field seems to be nothing but
buttercups, a veritable cloth of gold, yet the cows
go through it, eating all the grasses but leaving
both the leaves and flowers of the buttercup un-
touched. In this way the life of the buttercup is
preserved, and as far as we can see it owes its
preservation entirely to its scent. The colour
would not deter the cows, for they eat many
yellow flowers, nor would the acrid taste or shape
of the leaves deter them, for from the relative
position of the eyes and mouth of the cow when
feeding it is certain that they cannot see the
actual plant they are feeding on, and so it can
only be by the scent that they are warned from
it. And if animals are deterred from some
plants by their scent, it is by the scent that they
are attracted to others. It is not known for
certain how night moths are attracted to flowers
whether it is by sight or smell, but it seems most
probable that they are attracted in some cases by
sight and in some by smell, and in some by both
in

In My Vicarage Garden

combined. It may be that they are attracted
first by sight, for it has been often noted that a
large proportion of the flowers visited by night
moths are white, but when so attracted it would
seem that their sense of smell tells them whether
the flower is good for them, and indeed whether it
is the very flower they are seeking for. For all
insects seem to have their own special flowers,
and all flowers their own special insects. There
are, of course, cases of flowers being attractive to
more than one family of insects, and there are
insects, such as bees, which do not confine them-
selves to one flower only; but they all work within
certain fixed limits, and there are cases when, if
the particular insect does not come, the flower
cannot perfect itself. The common red clover
is a well-known case in point, which so much
requires the help of humble-bees — and no other
bee can help it — that Darwin believed that if
humble-bees became extinct in England the red
clover would wholly disappear ; and in New
Zealand it was necessary to ship a large quantity
of humble-bees from England before the red clover
produced any seed. A less known and almost
more curious instance occurs in the yucca, which
in Texas is fertilised by the small moth pronuba
yuccassella. In England the yucca at night is much
more attractive than by day ; the flowers, which are
bell-shaped by day, open and become bright stars by
night, and the delicate scent is more perceptible ;
but all the attractions are in vain, \hzpronuba is not
112

The Scents of Flowers

in England, and though seed vessels are formed,
perfect seed is never produced here, for apparently
no British moth can or will do the required work.
A large volume might be written, and more
than one has been written, on the different attrac-
tions which different plants offer to the insects
which are necessary to them, and among these
attractions scent holds a chief place. But this
does not prove, and as far as I know it has not
yet been proved, that scents are formed in flowers
to attract or ward off insects and other animals,
and, to my mind, the explanation goes a very
small way to account for the existence of scents,
which, as I have already said, seem to me to be
so far essential parts of the plant that in some
way, which I cannot in the least explain, the
plant is imperfect without its own peculiar scent,
so imperfect that the life of the plant cannot be
completely carried on if the scent or the glands
containing the scent are absent. Yet I do not
suppose from this that scent can ever form a
scientific differentia between one genus and an-
other, or between one species and another, for we
must allow that nothing can form such a differentia
which is impalpable to the touch or invisible.
Lucretius, indeed, held that odours, though in-
visible, had bodily substance, and in his desire to
explain everything in nature he proved his point
by the assertion that odours strike the nostrils : —

" Omnia corporea constare necesse est
Natura, quoniam sensus impellere possunt ; "
H 113

In My Vicarage Garden

but modern science does not admit this, and Lin-
naeus pointed out how erroneous it is to attempt
to separate species by their odours from the
familiar example that a dog will pick out his
own master in a crowd of other men, not by
sight but by smell, and so his canon was, " Odor
speciem nunquam clare distinguit." Yet, in his
love of classification, he classified the scents of
flowers, and divided them into six classes — (i)
Ambrosiaca, such as musk, sweet-scented ger-
anium, etc. ; (2) Fragrantia, such as the flowers
of pinks, jasmine, violets, etc., and the leaves of
lavender, thyme, balm, etc. ; (3) Aromatica (similar
in taste and smell), such as cinnamon, camphor,
orange, etc. ; (4) Graveolentia, subdivided into
Alliacea^ such as onions, garlick, asafcetida, etc.,
and Hircina, such as herb Robert and others ;
(5) Tetra, such as hemp and elder; and (6)
Nauseosa, producing sickness, such as veratrum,
colocynth, and tobacco (!) This is a curious ar-
rangement of flower-scents, and it is open to the
objection that the same scents are very different
to different people, so that scents which would
range themselves to some under tetra or nauseosa
would be ranged by others under fragrantia or
aromatica.

There are many curiosities connected with the
scent of flowers, but there is none more remark-
able than the way in which different persons are
affected by them. In some the sense is entirely
wanting, as in Dean Stanley, but in others who

114

The Scents of Flowers

have a keen sense of smell the scent of flowers
does not seem the same in any two persons. I
have heard, indeed, of a school inspector who
tested, or tried to test, the capacities of some
unfortunate school-children by telling them to
describe not only the colours, but the scents of
certain flowers ; but the ways of school inspectors
are wonderful. And it has been gravely asserted
that none but those with a long pedigree can
detect the smell of strawberry leaves dying in the
autumn, though Bacon classed their " most excel-
lent cordial smell," with violets and roses — i.e.
with the most common flower scents. If we may
judge from his silence, Homer seems to have
known nothing of the scents of flowers, for he
never mentioned them ; and, indeed, they are not
much mentioned by any Greek or Roman writer,
though both Greeks and Romans extracted the
scent for perfumes and ointments. The Bible, as
might be expected from its Oriental connection,
has frequent references to sweet smells, especially
of fruits and flowers, from Jacob's " smell of a field
which the Lord hath blessed," to St Paul's " odour
of a sweet smell " and " sweet-smelling savour," to
which he compares acceptable works. And Eng-
lish writers of all ages have rejoiced in the scents
of gardens and flowers ; Shakespeare is full of his
enjoyment in " the garden of sweet flowers, that
dainty odours from them threw around," and
Milton's appreciation, which was probably in-
creased by his blindness, is shown in a very
"5

In My Vicarage Garden

curious way. He had a deep love for the ipsissima
verba of the Bible, and in most cases keeps as
close as possible to them. But in his description
of the Fall, he goes beyond the text, which tells
how " the tree was good for food, and that it was
pleasant to the eyes," and he makes the chief
temptation to lie in the scent. Satan first says
that —

" From the boughes a savorie odour blown,
Grateful to appetite, more pleas'd my sense
Than smell of sweetest fennel."

Then in Eve there " waked an eager appetite,
raised by the smell so savorie of that fruit " ; and
then she brought to Adam —

" A bough of fairest fruit that downie smil'd,
New gathered and ambrosial smell diffused."

And, I believe, Milton is the first writer that called
the fruit an apple — " that crude apple that diverted
Eve " — though he may have used the word in its
old generic sense, by which almost any fruit was
called an apple.

Another curious thing in scents is that while
some flowers give out their scents voluntarily, in
others it has to be searched for. Of course, this
is so with plants whose scent is in the root or
seeds only ; but it is also the case with number-
less other sweet-scented flowers ; they have the
scent, but they keep it to themselves. Among
flowers which are " fast flowers of their smells "
Bacon reckons roses, bays, rosemary, and mar-

116

The Scents of Flowers

joram. Among flowers that are not so fast in
their smells the chief are limes and violets. In a
wood you may smell violets before you see them,
and rejoice in them ; you may also in the same
way detect the presence of ransoms or wild garlic,
but without the same enjoyment. I believe that
nearly all night-scented flowers give out their
scents voluntarily ; it is so certainly with the
night-scented stock, the night-blowing cereus, the
lychnis, and many others, and this would be very
useful in attracting the moths. It is well known
how strong is the scent of the sweetbriar after
rain ; this is supposed to arise from the breaking
of the scent-glands by the rain, which is also the
explanation of the strong scent of mint, thyme,
and other low -growing herbs when trodden on.
How large a part in the structure of some plants
is filled by these scent-glands may easily be seen
by holding up a myrtle leaf to the light ; the trans-
parent dots are the glands containing the scent.

Another curious thing in flower scents is that,
however strong the scent of some plants is, it is
quite imperceptible to some persons, who yet have
the full gift of smell. I knew a gardener who was
very sensitive to evil smells, but he told me he
could detect no scent whatever in any flower,
except the lemon-scented verbena (the leaves of
course) and some tea roses, but he was a great
snuff-taker, and he fancied that had altered, but
not destroyed, the sense of smell.

The commercial value of flower scents is very
117

In My Vicarage Garden

noteworthy. The manufacture of otto of roses,
which was brought to Europe from Persia, was
confined till very recent years to certain valleys
in Bulgaria, where it was carried on in a very rude
but picturesque fashion ; it is now carried on more
scientifically and with large profits in the south of
France and in some parts of Germany. And it is
the scent alone that gives a commercial value to
some other plants. The orchid family is, with the
exception of the compositae and gramineae, the
largest botanical family, as it is one of the most
beautiful. Perhaps, too, more money has been
spent on orchids than on any other tribe of plants,
yet its strictly commercial products are confined
to the sweet-scented seed-pods of the vanilla, for
the small production of starch and salep from a
few other species is scarcely worth mentioning.
In the same way in the " poor man's orchid," or
Iris, the only commercial product is derived from
the violet-scented orris root, which is made from
Iris Florentina.

Flower scents, like everything else, are amen-
able to education ; but they have this peculiarity,
that I know of no instance in which education, if
we may so call the high cultivation of some plants,
has increased or improved the scent ; but there
are many cases in which it has been quite de-
stroyed. We now have scentless roses, which
seems almost a contradiction in terms, and scent-
less carnations ; but I believe that if these were
to be so neglected as to degenerate, they would

118

The Scents of Flowers

gradually recover not only their old shapes, but
their old scents ; but on this I must speak doubt-
fully. I suppose this destruction of scents is
analogous to the destruction of the poisonous
qualities of plants by cultivation, as in the well-
known cases of the carrot, parsnip, and celery ;
and I suppose it is also analogous to the way in
which the unpleasant properties of plants are
dispelled by cooking.

And among the most curious and the most
delightful properties of flower scents is the way
in which, more than anything else, they help to
recall days that are past, and places and friends
that are far distant. " I can shut my eyes and
think about gardens and that," said a child in a
children's hospital, when a bunch of wallflowers
was given to her. But on this part of my subject,
pleasant though it is, I must here say nothing,
because I have already said much in a former
paper on " Garden Associations," l and because I
must bring my paper to a close. I will do so by
expressing a hope that from the little here said
some will regard flower scents not merely as an
adjunct of flowers formed to please the nose, as
the shapes and colours please the eye, but as
something which the life of the plant requires.
That we cannot tell everything about them is of
very small consequence ; they add to the delight
of our gardens, and, none the less so, because they
are mysteries.

1 " In a Gloucestershire Garden," p. 269.
119

CHAPTER XIV
THE MEDICAL PROPERTIES OF FLOWERS

BY " their medical properties " I mean that
every plant has either in its juices, or in some
other definite part, certain qualities which not
only determine its taste, but which also make the
plant wholesome or unwholesome to man or beast ;
and I consider that these qualities, though not
sufficient to create a scientific differentia either
in a genus or species, are yet so distinct in each
plant that they are essential in some way or other
to the life and well-being of the particular plant in
which they are found.

In the medical properties of plants there are
two extremes ; in the one extreme every part of
the plant is a deadly poison to man and beast ;
in the other, as in the date palm, and the bamboos,
there is no part of the plant that is not useful to
man, and is conducive to his health and comfort.
The existence of the very poisonous plants is a
great puzzle to those who can only estimate the
value of a plant by its usefulness to man ; for a
plant which in its normal and natural state is fatal
to man can hardly be considered useful to him,
however it may be modified by dilution or otherwise

120

Medical Properties of Flowers

into a medicine. But when it is recognised that
in some way or other what we call the medical
properties of a plant are essential to its life and
well-being, then a good reason for its presence in
the plant is established.

But though I feel sure that the medical pro-
perties of plants are necessary and essential parts
of them, yet they cannot form a scientific differentia
either in a genus or species. As with scent, so
with the medical or other uses of a plant, Linnaeus
condemned their being named to distinguish genera
or species, though he allowed the medical names
to be used as synonymous ; but his rule was, " Vis
et usus differentiam Botanico vanam subministrant" ',
and he even said that genera established pharmaco-
peorum gratia were contra leges creatoris. The
medical properties of plants may, therefore, take
the rank in scientific botany that the scents do ;
but there is one very important difference, and it
is on that that I wish especially to speak in this
paper ; and the difference is this, that in a very
large number of plants the good or bad qualities
of a plant can be distinguished by the growth,
shape, colour, etc., of the stems, leaves, or flowers ;
so that even without a deep knowledge of botany,
almost any observer can say of a plant that it is
good for human use or bad.

This is a very old opinion, and it reached its
height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The old doctrine was, Millia sunt mala, millia
etiam remedia, and it was a matter almost of

121

In My Vicarage Garden

religious faith that though man was subject to
endless diseases, there was for every disease a
certain remedy ; and more than that, it was
believed that the Creator, in His pity for suffering
man, had so marked different plants that every
sufferer could easily discover for himself the plant
that would meet his special need. This was the
doctrine of signatures, of which a great deal was
written that was both silly and false, but which
was firmly held not only by those who were them-
selves silly or false, but also by many who were
really good and learned men. According to this
doctrine you had only to look at a plant, and if
you could find anything that in shape or colour
resembled the part of the body that was diseased
or the disease itself, that was at once a proof that
the plant was good for you ; it was nature's own
prescription, which could be safely followed ; for
in every plant there was good or evil or both ;
they were all "baleful weeds or precious-juiced
flowers," and by their signatures each could be
placed in its proper rank. Without going into
this at any length it will be enough to say that a
heart-shaped leaf was supposed to be good for
heart disease, a spotted leaf (like pulmonarid) was
good for diseased lungs, a plant with swellings at
the joints was good for gout, while the extremes
were reached in the walnut and the fern : the
walnut, with its outer skin, its hard, brittle shell,
and its peculiar kernel was a sure remedy for all
diseases of the head, whether of the skin, the skull,

122

Medical Properties of Flowers

or the brain, and the fern, from its absence of
flowers and apparent want of seed, was the chief
or only ingredient in making invisible garments.

We now laugh at the doctrine of signatures ;
and in this, as in many other matters, we flatter
ourselves that we are better and wiser than our
fathers. But with them it was no laughing matter ;
it was held in all sober seriousness, and was freely
quoted as a striking proof of the love and good-
ness of the Creator. And now it is found that
though they were wrong in the working out of
the principle, yet that the principle itself is not
altogether wrong, for the modern botanical arrange-
ment of plants, the natural system, has clearly
established the fact that a knowledge of the
structure of plants, and even a very limited know-
ledge, will go a long way in determining whether
a plant is wholesome or baleful. This was not
the intention of those who worked out the system,
nor is it an essential part of it ; but it has arisen
naturally, and the result has been that certain
families of plants, and those among the largest,
carry in their outward structure distinct marks of
their medical values and other useful or hurtful
properties. A very short glance at some of the
principal botanical families will show what I
mean.

The first great family with which an English

botanical student has to make himself acquainted

is the large family of the Ranunculaceae. The

family is very easily distinguished by the many

123

In My Vicarage Garden

stamens surrounding but lying under the ovaries
or ovary, and it is a large family containing more
than 500 species, and is remarkable for the abun-
dance of plants produced in almost every one of
the species, and every genus and every species of
the family is more or less poisonous to man ; every
individual in the family bears upon it a sure
signature that it is not good for food ; and that
every preparation made from it must be used with
caution.

Another family is as clearly marked and as
easily recognised — the great family of the Cruci-
ferae, with its four petals always arranged in the
form of a cross and no bracts, has over 1200
species, and it contains many of the plants most
useful for human food — the turnip, radish, cabbage,
cress, seakale, mustard, and many others, all be-
long to this family; and we are not surprised to
find that the old herbalists easily recognised this
peculiar character, and that the old emblem-writers
seized upon it to enforce the lesson of " in cruce
satus."

Another large and important family, equally
well-marked for good, and as easy to distinguish,
is the family of the Labiates — always with square
stems, opposite leaves, and irregular flowers. No
family is more easily recognised, and as a further
help the aromatic scent of the plants will give
a sure sign, for throughout the whole family,
numbering 2600 species, I believe there is not
one species without this fine aromatic scent either

124

Medical Properties of Flowers

in stem, leaves, flower, or seed, and sometimes in
all, and not one species which can in any way
be called hurtful to man or beast. It is in this
family that we find mint, thyme, lavender, mar-
joram, peppermint, basil, sage, balm, and a host
of other similar plants, many of them also among
our most beautiful garden flowers.

I have taken three families in which the
harmful and wholesome properties are distinctly
marked ; I will shortly take one in which they
are combined and yet are curiously separate, and
are also distinctly marked. There is no need
to dwell on the distinctive marks of the rosaceae ;
they (almost universally) have regular flowers of
five petals, the leaves with stipules, many stamens,
and in the great families of the roses (roseae\ the
apples (pomeae), and the plums (pruneae), of
which only I will speak, with the seed-vessel, or
fruit beneath the calyx (ovary inferior). To this
large family we are indebted for our best and
most wholesome fruits — pears, apples, strawberries,
peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums, raspberries,
blackberries, cherries all belong to this family ;
and there is nothing unwholesome to man or
beast, with some curious and well-marked excep-
tions. Where the fruit is a fleshy pome, as in
apples or pears, or in many combined drupes, as
in raspberries and blackberries, the plant is alto-
gether wholesome and good. But when, as in
another branch of the family, the pruneae, the
fruit is in single drupes, with the seed or kernel

In My Vicarage Garden

enclosed in a hard shell, as in plums and cherries,
the fleshy part of the fruit is wholesome and
refreshing, but in the kernel and in the leaves
there is a large quantity of prussic or hydrocyanic
acid. This mixture of wholesomeness and un-
wholesomeness in the same plant was a great
puzzle to the old herbalists ; but they could not
resist the fact, and Friar Laurence, in his pleasant
moralising on the virtues of plants, did not pass
this by: —

" Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison has residence and medicine power ;
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part ;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart."

And then he pleasantly traces the analogy of good
and evil in us, " in man as well as herbs, grace and
rude will."

Space forbids my going much further into this
question, but I must name, though very shortly,
two more families, which I can scarcely pass by
altogether, for they stand out from all other
botanical families by the large number of the
species they contain, and by the strong characters
which so easily distinguish them from all other
plants. The two families I mean are the com-
positae and gramineae. The merest tyro in
botany knows the general appearance of a com-
posite plant, of which the daisy, the dandelion,
and the groundsel are such familiar instances ;
but the most learned botanist will confess that
the family is full of puzzles and difficulties, which

126

Medical Properties of Flowers

few would boast to have altogether mastered, for
the family consists of more than i ooo genera and
8000 species, of which the groundsels alone claim
over 500 species, and they are scattered all over
the world. Yet of these 8000 species there is
not one that can be called absolutely hurtful ; it
is true there are not many that are of much use
to man, but it is something to know that at least
they will not hurt him. The other great family,
the gramineae^ do not contain so many species
— they are between 4000 and 5000 — but in
abundance of individuals they surpass all other
plants. They are to be found everywhere, in all
climates, arctic, tropical, or temperate ; they are
in every geological formation ; they are easily
distinguished from every other plant, and there
is not a single member of the family from the
minutest grass to the most gigantic bamboo, that
is not useful to man. Sir J. Hooker well sums up
the properties of the family — "Nutritious herbage,
and farinaceous seed; stem and leaves useful for
various textile and other purposes."

I have only mentioned six families of plants,
but they are good representative families, and I
have selected them because they are easy of
recognition ; but I could easily have gone much
further and have shown that what I have said
of these six families is, more or less, true of all
plants ; and the point that I wish to establish is
that our fathers were not so foolish as they might
appear in their doctrine of signatures ; there is
127

In My Vicarage Garden

such a doctrine, different from theirs, but per-
fectly true ; and that it is true is, I think, a very
remarkable fact, because the present arrangement of
plants was carried out with no reference whatever
to the medical or economic uses of plants ; yet
these uses do so range themselves under different
families that a knowledge of the structure of the
plants in any family is a great help in arriving at
a knowledge of the uses. In some cases the
qualities of a plant are shown not by the stem,
leaves, or flower, but by the juices ; as in the
Euphorbias and Asclepiads, where the white,
clammy juices at once give a warning that the
plant is to be suspected. And there is one curious
case in which a very small difference in the form
of the leaf is enough to show its qualities. Senna
is produced from different species of Cassia, and
in the imported drugs leaves are sent which are
very like the true ones, but which are useless.
The difference, however, is easily detected by
sharp eyes. The Cassia has compound leaves
with very small leaflets, and in the leaf of the
true Senna the two sides of the leaflets are un-
equal, one side being very slightly shorter than
the other ; if the sides are quite equal the true
drug will not be produced.

Now the question naturally arises — Is there
really any connection between the structure of a
plant or colour of a flower and its medical uses ?
Is it possible that the aromatic scents of lavender
or thyme can only be produced by a square

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Medical Properties of Flowers

stem, opposite leaves, and irregular flowers ? Or
that dangerous qualities cannot exist in such a
formation, but require something very different,
such as is found in Ranunculaceae ? Or that true
senna really depends upon a slight irregularity in
the leaf? Such questions may be multiplied ad
infinitum, and to each the same answer must be
given that we cannot explain the connection but
that it certainly exists ; the facts are there, and
we should not be much wiser if we could explain
them, and we cannot.

But with respect to poisonous plants it may
be well to note that a plant may be very dan-
gerous in one state and quite harmless in another.
Many of the poisons are very volatile, and dis-
appear when the plant is dried, and in many
cases when it is cultivated or cooked. In a
hayrick many very poisonous plants can be found,
all quite harmless in the dry state ; and I suppose
this is the explanation of the harmlessness of
the large quantity of colchicum in the Alpine
meadows. The colchicum is closely allied to the
very poisonous veratrum, and when eaten fresh
by grazing cattle it is very injurious to them ;
but when dry the poison may be destroyed. And
not only can poisonous plants be thus made
harmless, but in many cases they are fatal to man
but not to beast, and fatal to some beasts and
not to others. Pheasants will eat the acrid and
poisonous roots of the buttercup, so that the
author of The Pheasant, in the " Fur and Feather "
i 129

In My Vicarage Garden

series, says that he dissected a cock pheasant in
the month of June and found the crop full of the
roots of the common buttercup. Lucretius noted
this, and having said —

" Quod all cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum " —

proved it by the statement that hemlock and
veratrum were poisonous to every other animal,
but that goats fattened on them, and that vera-
trum was also a fattening food for quails. I
cannot say how far this is verified by modern
observation, though I have asked for information
from many ; but I do not know in what part of
Italy Lucretius made his observations.

It is an obvious truism that people are differ-
ently affected by poisonous plants, but it is hard
to explain why it should be so. Leaving out of
the question poisons taken knowingly for special
reasons, many are variously affected by them in
other ways. Some persons have been made
seriously ill by sleeping under or near yew trees ;
and others have been still more distressed by
even passing through tracts of the California bay,
a bush with a very pungent scent, which in my
own garden I have seen produce very unpleasant
effects to some people, while to others it is nothing
but a pleasant smell ; and the poison oak of
America will give headaches to some passing at
many yards' distance, and to many has been quite
fatal, while on others it has no effect ; but it has
such a decidedly bad character that I always
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Medical Properties of Flowers

advise its destruction whenever I meet with it, in
spite of its beautiful autumnal tints.

It would be too long even to mention many
other poisonous plants, however full of interest
they may be ; but the upas tree cannot altogether
be left out. We can many of us remember the
dreadful accounts of this tree, which we were
taught was one of the wonders of Java, and cer-
tainly the account of it, which was given by the
Dutch Surgeon Foersch about a hundred years
ago, was so circumstantial in all its details that it
is not surprising that it was fully believed. Darwin
naturally seized upon it, and in the Loves of the
Plants gave a full account of it, beginning with —

" Fierce in dread silence on the blasted Heath
Fell Upas sits, the Hydra Tree of death,"

and in the appendix he gave Foersch's account in
full. But it is now known that the greater part
was pure invention, and what was true in it was
much exaggerated. Still there is such a tree in
Java, Antiaris toxicaria, of the same family as
the bread fruit and very poisonous; and the
" blasted heath " in which it was said to grow
is not altogether imaginary, for the trees grow in
valleys which are unwholesome and even fatal to
animal life, not by reason of the upas tree, but
of the mephitic volcanic vapours escaping from
crevices in the ground.

The Preacher reckoned among the qualities of
the wise man "certain knowledge of the things

In My Vicarage Garden

that are . . . the diversities of plants and the
virtues of roots," and on that high authority I
think no apology is needed for writing on the
scents of flowers, their virtues, and their uses.
The more I study plants the more I feel that
there is no part of a plant that is beneath our
study, and whenever I meet with a brother gardener
I like to tell him that, however successful he may
be in growing plants and bringing them to high
perfection of flower and fruit, yet he knows little
of his flowers if he is content to stop there ; and
that he misses a great deal of pleasure if he refuses
to examine as far as he can every part of every
plant he grows ; and while I never met with a
gardener who regretted spending some of his
spare time in learning the minute history of his
plants, I have met with many who have found
in it not only much real pleasure and interest, but
much also to help them in the practical cultivation
of their plants.

132

CHAPTER XV
RAILWAY GARDENS

THERE are two sorts of railway gardens. There
is the railway-station garden, with which we are
all so familiar, the long strips running parallel
to the platforms, often wonderfully bright with
flowers, and showing very good specimens of
gardening under difficulties. For it is a very
difficult thing to manage a garden often more
than a hundred yards long, and perhaps not a
yard in width, with a soil that in many cases is
little more than rubbish shot there when the
railway was being made, and always liable to
ill-treatment and thefts from trippers and other
thoughtless travellers. Yet in spite of difficulties
there is scarcely a country station that does not
show a pleasant and often quite a wonderful show
of flowers, and wherever the stationmaster shows
himself anxious to make his station smart and
beautiful with flowers, he is sure to meet with
ready help from the great gardens at the hall or
the smaller gardens of the parsonage and other
neighbours. There is another person besides the
stationmaster who is gradually taking possession
of rail way -station gardens. Little by little
nurserymen are finding out that it is a good
133

In My Vicarage Garden

advertisement to take in charge the strips of
garden on the platforms ; and very bright they
make them for us, and keep them so more or
less all the year. I believe this originated in
Scotland. Twenty years ago or more a large
nursery garden near Dumfries station was allowed
to overflow its bounds and to fill the side
approaches to the station with gay jflowers ; and
English nurserymen are slowly following the
example, to the great advantage of English
travellers, and, we may hope, to their own ad-
vantage.

But it is not of railway gardens planted and
kept in order by stationmasters and porters, or
by nurserymen, that I now wish to speak. My
subject is railway gardens planted and kept
beautiful by nature. These gardens are getting
well-established all over the country, and if as
we travel we will note the flowers on either side
of us we shall often see much to delight and
interest us, and in many instances we shall see
some results that are very curious.

What I mean is this. When a railway is first
made, the line is bounded either by the sides of a
cutting, or by an embankment falling away from
the line, or by a broad, flat verge ; but whether it
is a cutting, or an embankment, or a verge, the
result is raw, bare, and often ugly. But nature
does not allow it to remain so for long ; in a very
short time the bare sides get clothed, and often
before a year is past the surface is fully covered

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Railway Gardens

with a vegetation entirely of nature's planting.
In a few cases, where the ground is treacherous,
the sides are planted with plants of different kinds
that will help to hold up the shifty soil ; but in
the greater part of the line the clothing is all
natural. And then this curious result follows —
that the sides of a railway are found to be safe
places for many plants which in other places
have to fight their way against many diffi-
culties ; for the sides of the railways are not eaten
down by cattle or sheep, and they are very little
trespassed upon, and so plants get a good chance
of growing and getting well-established ; and rail-
way gardens are formed, planted by nature, and
often furnished with plants that are unknown to
the immediate neighbourhood, and that are in
some cases rarities in the British flora — and these
are the railway gardens of which I wish to say
something.

It is, indeed, marvellous how very soon the
bare, raw face of a railway cutting or embank-
ment will get fully clothed with plants. On the
Midland Railway, between Bath and Bristol, a
deep cutting showed a vast cliff of red sandstone
known to be of very great depth, and butting up
against it was a series of liassic formations of
various ages, such formations not lying horizontally,
but forming a succession of concavities lying one
upon another, and with the intervals filled with
liassic clays. It was easily seen, was visited by
many geologists, but only for a short time ; within

In My Vicarage Garden

eighteen months the whole was so covered with
vegetation that for geologists the view was closed.

Now in all cases of railway sides covered by
vegetation the commencement is made by seeds
blown from the neighbouring fields and hedges,
which find soil ready for them, and being undis-
turbed, grow up speedily and vigorously. But there
are a great many which cannot be thus accounted
for, many which are new to these fresh localities,
and many which will, in time, alter the floras of
different neighbourhoods, and in some cases have
already done so. Some of these instances of
plants appearing in new places I will now give,
confining myself to the railways.

One of the most curious instances is the case of
the London rocket (Sisymbrium irio). It appeared
abundantly in London after the Great Fire, and
then disappeared. The only other place in which
it had been constantly noted was at Berwick-
upon-Tweed, where it still exists on some rubbish-
heaps outside the town. Earth from the rubbish-
heaps has constantly been carted on to the
different fields, but the rocket never appeared in
them, but —

"In 1847 a large quantity of earth was taken from an
adjoining field, where the irio was never known to grow,
and used to make the embankment on which the station of
the North British Railway partly stands. The irio grew up
in front of the bank in great profusion immediately." —
Johnston, Botany of the Eastern Border.

It did not remain many years in that particular

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Railway Gardens

spot, but I am told that it still at times appears
on other parts of the railway embankment ;
otherwise it is quite confined to the rubbish-
heaps.

In a cutting on the North Kent line, near
Gravesend, the sides of the cutting for nearly two
miles are completely covered with wild Valerian.
When they are in flower it is a most beautiful
sight, and almost worth a special journey to see
it. The flowers are of all shades of red, from the
palest pink to deep crimson ; white specimens
have been reported to have been found among
them, but I have not seen them. The same
valerian clothes very prettily a deep cutting near
Chepstow, but there it is mixed with other plants,
and so the mass of colour is less, but it is sure to
increase, and may in time fill the whole cutting.
This valerian is a British plant, and fairly com-
mon, so that it is not surprising to find it on
almost any place ; but my two next examples are
something of a surprise.

On the London Chatham and Dover Railway
there is a cutting near Sole Street station, not
very deep but with steep rocky sides : these sides
being, of course, rather roughly hewn have several
narrow ledges and other " coigns of vantage."
These have been taken possession of by the
garden Canterbury Bell, both white and blue,
though the name " Canterbury Bell " was origin-
ally given to our wild plant, C. trachelium, because
" it grows very plentifully in the lowe woods and

In My Vicarage Garden

hedge rows of Kent " (Gerard). Yet it is more
generally applied to the garden Canterbury Bells,
C. Medium, and this is the plant which is so
abundant in the Sole Street cutting. It is not
a British plant, but is found chiefly in the south
of France, and is also found in Italy and in
Turkey. There seems no reason why it should
not become perfectly naturalised in its new rail-
road home, though it may be a great puzzle why
it has not found a congenial home long before
this, for it has been a favourite in English gardens
for three hundred years, having been grown both
by Gerard and Parkinson. I do not know the
reason for the name given to the plant by
Linnaeus, C. Medium^ but the name of one fine
British bell flower, C. trachelium, is directly from
the Greek rpa^Xog, a throat, and was probably
adopted from its older English name, throatwort,
" because they are excellent good against the
inflammation of the throate and uvula " (Gerard).
Another foreigner has completely established
itself on an embankment of the Great Western,
near Bath. This is the giant parsnip (heracleum
villosum\ a native of the Caucasus, and in this
case it is known to have been an escape from the
garden of the engineer who made that part of the
line. It is a grand plant, and seeds very freely
and is a troublesome weed in gardens, but on the
railway embankment it is a great ornament.

On a rough barren piece of ground near one
of the stations of the Midland Railway, between

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Railway Gardens

Bath and Bristol, I have this year seen with much
pleasure a goodly patch of the viper's bugloss
(Echium vulgare). This plant is not uncommon
in many parts of England, especially in the chalk
districts, but it is a very rare plant in the Bath
and Bristol flora, so rare that only two stations
are given for it, and in those stations it is far
from abundant ; yet it has found a suitable home
on this railway bank, and will very probably
increase and multiply there. When I say that
I have been much pleased to see it, it is because
I consider it one of our most beautiful British
plants ; the union of azure blue, with red in the
same flower, is very unusual and very beautiful.
The spotted stem suggested a viper's skin, and
the seed was supposed to be like a viper's head,
and hence the name, and in the days of the
doctrine of signatures it was considered a safe
remedy against the bite of vipers, as it still is in
Spain and Portugal.

We cannot suppose that plants can in any way
choose their habitats, but we can easily see that if
by chance a seed should light upon a spot which
was at the same time not easily reached by man
or beast and had suitable soil it would there at
once take root and flourish, and this must be the
explanation of the occurrence of plants in un-
expected places, as railway banks and cuttings,
and there flourishing with unwonted vigour. The
finest bee orchis I ever saw was at the top of a
deep cutting through a sandstone rock ; it was

In My Vicarage Garden

not exactly a railway cutting, but it was a road
cutting made to divert a road for a railway, and
so may find a place here. Orchids seem especially
to look for a quiet and undisturbed place ; they
dislike removal, and require great care in growing
after being removed from their old quarters, and
such quiet places they seem to find in railway
embankments and cuttings. I have seen good
plants of O. pyramidalis in a cutting on the Great
Western between Bath and Bristol, and this orchis
is very scarce in the immediate neighbourhood,
though it is abundant in some parts of the Cots-
wolds, perhaps twenty miles distant. In the same
neighbourhood I have seen the handsome large
butterfly orchis growing close to the rails. This
grows in woods near at hand, but not abundantly ;
and I never saw one outside these woods till this
one found a quiet resting-place that suited its
wants as well as the quiet of the woods.

In another way it may happen that in years to
come the railway will be a record, and, perhaps,
the only record, of the nature of the country as it
originally was before the railway came to it. I
know of one piece of railway that passes through
an old common. Little by little the common is
getting covered with cottages, and the flora is
getting entirely destroyed by donkeys and other
animals, and by constant traffic. But between
the two hedges of the railway the old flora of the
common has well established itself, and is spread-
ing in such a way that there is little fear of its

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Railway Gardens

being destroyed ; and what a few years ago was
bare earth and rubble is now covered with the
heather, the dwarf autumnal gorse, the small
campanula, and other heath plants.

These few instances will be enough to show
how even railroads may have their uses in pre-
serving to us many plants that might otherwise
be lost, sometimes altogether, and sometimes from
particular districts ; and I could have added others.
Very remarkable is the way in which even our
common plants get an increased luxuriance when
they find a home within the boundaries of a rail-
way. There are many places in which primroses
and cowslips may be found in abundance in the
fields and hedgerows, but whenever I see them so
growing I fancy that they are always finer when
they have fixed themselves on the adjoining rail-
ways. I cannot say for certain that it is so,
because it is not always possible to make the
actual comparison when travelling ; but so it has
often seemed to me as I pass them, and I have
found that fellow-travellers have made the same
remark. It is only natural that it should be so ;
a plant that is constantly eaten down by cattle
will never attain the same luxuriance as one of
the same sort that is untouched on a railway bank
or in a secluded wood.

How plants have the power of migrating and

finding for themselves new and suitable homes in

fresh localities is a very good subject for inquiry ;

but that they have the power is matter of common

141

In My Vicarage Garden

everyday observation. Where the plants found on
railways are the plants of the adjoining woods, fields,
and hedgerows, the explanation is very easy. A
slight wind or a few birds will soon carry seeds
enough to stock a large place ; and in some places
the wind or the birds have carried the seeds from
gardens more or less near, as must have been the
case with the Canterbury Bell on the London,
Chatham, and Dover Railway, which I have de-
scribed. But this will not explain it all ; and I
am sure that the full explanation can be" found in
the fact that nature seems, as it were, always on
the look-out for places in which plants can find
an abiding home. If plants were confined to
cultivated spots only, or if they depended on man
only for their dispersion and cultivation, there
would indeed be more tracts barren and desolate
than of well-clothed country ; but, as Sir Thomas
Browne said, " the whole earth is the garden of
nature, and each fruitful country a paradise," and
there are more gardens and paradises planted by
nature than by man. And Sir Thomas Browne
also noticed how independent of man nature is
when he said : —

" The seminal powers of plants lie in great part invisible,
while the sun finds polypody in stone walls, the little sting-
ing nettle and nightshade in barren, sandy highways, scurvy-
grass in Greenland, and unknown plants in earth brought
from unknown countries."

With a slight modification " earth brought from
unknown countries " explains the existence of

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Railway Gardens

many plants found on railways. Embankments
are often made of materials brought from a great
distance, and the embankment is of a very different
nature from the surrounding ground on which it
is raised ; and in the materials are often the begin-
nings of the vegetation which in time will clothe
the embankment either in the shape of roots or
buried seeds. Then comes in the other great
factor of success in the full growth of the vegeta-
tion so commenced, that it is from the very first
undisturbed, not grazed on by cattle, and little
trespassed on by man.

Geologists have long recognised that one of the
greatest helps to geology in recent times has been
found in the railways. During the last seventy
years wonderful geological sections have been
brought to light which would, but for the rail-
ways, have been entirely buried ; and from these
sections many new lessons in geology have been
learned, and if many old theories have been de-
stroyed, many substantial truths have taken their
place. The service which railways have given to
botany is different. They have not revealed new
plants, but I am sure they are doing much to
preserve old ones, and this result is none the less
pleasant because it was unexpected and unintended.
When contractors complete a railway, nothing can
be much uglier in all the parts where old soil has
been disturbed, or new brought in ; but the rail-
way is not completed when the contractors leave
it — Nature then takes it in hand, and, with its

In My Vicarage Garden

dislike to all that is ugly, it seizes on each vacant
piece of ground, brings to it from every quarter
seeds and even roots, and in a very short time
clothes it with beauty that, being undisturbed, will
be the inheritance of the railway as long as the
railway itself lasts, and will make our railways as
happy hunting-grounds for the botanist as they
have been for the geologist.1

1 A writer in The Globe (in 1898) confirms this. He says, "A
Londoner would have to walk many miles before he encountered
such an assortment of wild plants as that which he can inspect
along the railway banks, for example, between Gloucester Road
and Earl's Court Station. ... A wealth of plants which are
associated with hedgerows along country roads is to be found which
somehow or other have fought their way into the wilderness of
bricks and mortar."

144

CHAPTER XVI

OUR NATIONAL GARDENS

A VERY busy Londoner once told me that he
thought it the duty of every Londoner to go once
a week to Kew, not merely to please his eyes, but
as the readiest and nearest place of refreshment
to his body, with the opportunity of slowly taking
in small lessons on many subjects. Such an
exodus from London to Kew would overtax even
the resources of Kew ; but it is surprising to find
how very few Londoners, whether residents or
visitors, have any real acquaintance with a place
open to all, within an hour's drive of London, and
which is unsurpassed by any similar establishment
in the world. Many who pride themselves in
seeing everything that is to be seen in London,
and knowing everything that is worth seeing, have
never been to Kew ; and I have often found that
the real hindrance to their going is in some cases
that it does not rank' as a fashionable lounge, but
far more from a complete ignorance as to what
is to be seen at Kew, and how it can best be seen.
I think that some short account of it may be
useful, and may perhaps tempt some to see for
themselves a part of our national property of which
every educated Englishman may feel proud.
K 145

In My Vicarage Garden

There are, of course, some, and perhaps not a
few, who think that to spend the money of the
nation on a garden is a waste : they would at
once disestablish and disendow all public gardens ;
but I am sure that such persons are in a minority,
and a quite insignificant minority, not only among
Englishmen, but among all civilised nations. To
establish public gardens would certainly not be
the first care of any rising State ; but it is found
to be almost the first when the foundations have
been well laid, and there is nothing that shows
that a nation has reached a high state of civilisation
and a state of stability as the formation of public
gardens. " A man shall ever see," said Bacon,
" that when ages grow to civility and elegancy,
men come to build stately sooner than to garden
finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection ; "
but the fine gardens soon follow upon the stately
buildings. It does not seem to be known for
certain what European State first led the way in
the formation of public gardens — i.e. of gardens
maintained by the State. Hallam says that the
first public garden was founded at Pisa in 1545,
and a somewhat earlier date has been claimed for
a similar garden at Padua ; but, though these may
have been public gardens, they were attached to
Universities, and do not seem to have been main-
tained out of national money. Prescott, however,
has told us that long before this public gardens of
great excellence and beauty were established in
Mexico, in which not only were the beautiful

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Our National Gardens

plants of the country cultivated with great skill
and care, but plants were collected from many
other countries, and these plants " were system-
atically arranged by the Aztecs, who understood
their properties, and collected them into nurseries,
more extensive than any then existing in the old
world." In England the Physic Garden at Oxford
and the Apothecaries' Garden at Chelsea led the
way as public gardens, but they were not maintained
or even helped by the public purse.

The beginning and progress of Kew as a public
and national garden have an interesting history.
A little more than a hundred and fifty years ago
the whole property was in private hands, but even
then the gardens were reckoned among the best
in the country. After being leased to the Prince
of Wales, they were bought by George III., and
under the able advice of the Earl of Bute and
the management of the Aitons the character of
the gardens was well maintained, but they were
in no sense public property. After some years'
neglect they were placed under the care of Sir
William Hooker, and to some extent were opened
to the public. From that time the progress has
been steady ; by the liberality of the Queen the
size of the gardens has been increased from the
twelve acres which were opened to the public in
1840 to more than 300 acres; and under the
skilful, and we may say the loving, management
of Sir William Hooker, Sir Joseph Hooker, and
the present director, Sir W. Thiselton Dyer, the
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In My Vicarage Garden

gardens have been brought to a very high pitch of
excellence, and have been arranged and managed
with a constant eye to the instruction and comfort
of the public.

Such is a very short account of the rise and
progress of the gardens to their present state,
leaving untold the many ways by which the gardens
and museums have been furnished from all parts
of the world by purchases in many cases, but still
more by gifts from persons of all ranks and con-
ditions, till it may safely be said that nowhere in
the world can the vegetable products of all parts
be more easily and more perfectly studied.

But the gardens are not only for botanical
students ; they contain a wealth of flowers which
give pleasure to thousands who have little or no
scientific knowledge, while their beauty alone will
be a pleasure to many others. Still, as I said
before, there are many living within easy reach of
Kew who know nothing of it, and there are some,
or rather many, who go to Kew and come back
without having seen a twentieth part of the garden,
and with an ignorance of the contents which may
almost be called absurd. But it is a large place,
and unless a person goes there with guidance of
some sort, and also with some definite idea as to
the special objects which he wishes to see, he may
come away quite disappointed ; and I have known
a clever man who went there and asked for the
Botanical Garden, and, having seen the scien-
tifically arranged portion to which he had been

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Our National Gardens

directed, and which lies near one of the entrance-
gates, he fancied he had seen everything, and
naturally came away with the idea that the great
national garden of which he had heard so much
was very small and very ugly. A guide of some
sort is necessary. If the stranger can go under
the guidance of one who knows the garden well,
that will be the best ; if he has no one who can
personally conduct him, he may buy one of the
guide-books on sale at the gates, and with some
little trouble he may choose for himself the parts
that he most wishes to see. But almost every
visitor will have a different object in view ; and if
I was asked to conduct a friend I should not take
him to the parts which I most liked myself, but
should find out what branch of botany or garden-
ing he most wished to study. If, for instance, he
wished to know something of the scientific arrange-
ment of plants I should take him to the strictly
Botanic Garden, where plants are arranged accord-
ing to their families in long narrow beds, each
bed representing a particular family, and contain-
ing good typical plants of the families ; but I
should not take any but a scientific student there,
for the garden is necessarily stiff and ugly. If he
wished to know something of the plants used in
medicine or commerce — something of the economic
uses of plants or their commercial products — I
should take him to the Economic House, in which
are grown, but in a very limited space, many of the
plants that are most useful to mankind, such as
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In My Vicarage Garden

fibre plants and plants producing chocolate, tea,
coffee, cinnamon, cloves, cotton, ginger, gutta-
percha, Indiarubber, strychnine, pepper, quinine,
sarsaparilla, etc. But I should not consider that
I had shown him all he ought to see in this
department unless I had also taken him to the
museums, in which the many products of the
vegetable world are shown in their raw states, in
the different processes of manufacture, and in
their final results. If he wanted to know the best
plants with which to stock his garden for purely
ornamental purposes I should take him to the
Rock Garden. I consider this one of the great
successes of Kew, by which I do not mean that
it is the best example of what a Rock Garden
should be, and might be, but I consider it a very
successful example of such a garden in a public
garden, for the requirements of a public and private
garden are essentially different. In a private
garden the rock garden may be in a retired spot,
with small tortuous paths, some of them leading
to nowhere in particular, with small nooks and
pleasant surprises, ups and downs, and a general
wildness. In a public garden all this is impos-
sible. The paths must be wide enough for many
at once going, it may be, in different directions ;
the plan must be clear and well defined ; and the
plants named with conspicuous tallies. The idea
of the Kew Rock Garden is the dry bed of a
small river, such as abound in Spain in summer,
of which the bottom forms the path and the sides

Our National Gardens

are clothed with flowers. It was made in 1881,
chiefly in consequence of a memorial to the Board
of Works from many lovers of gardens, and after
some difficulty a grant was made, and, though it
was a wretchedly small grant, it has certainly
enabled Kew to grow and show to advantage a
large number of plants which were grown before
with difficulty and were not well shown. Of
course, it does not please everybody ; objection
is taken to the wide and very conspicuous path,
to the uniformity in height of the sides, and to
the presence of conspicuous labels, which destroy
any attempt at an appearance of wildness ; but
such objectors should remember the peculiar diffi-
culties of such a work in a public garden, and the
small amount of money spent upon it. Another
excellent addition that has lately been made to
the hardy garden is the new Bamboo Garden. It
is placed near one of the prettiest parts of the
garden, near the dell full of rhododendrons, and
very near the river ; this, too, though still young,
is a great success, and it has already given good
object-lessons to the many who now grow bamboos.
Not only does it show the complete hardiness and
easy cultivation of many species, but it has pointed
out a way of cultivation of which many growers
were ignorant. It has been quite a lesson to
many of us not only that bamboos delight in a
large supply of water, but that they are gross
feeders, and should have a supply of manure to
which there seems to be almost no limit. This

In My Vicarage Garden

had been very little done before by bamboo-
growers, but when we recollect that bamboos are
only gigantic grasses, and that on account of
their gigantic character they are very exhaustive
to the soil, the reason of the thing is at once
acknowledged.

But to return to my imaginary friend. If he
was laying out a garden of some extent for the
first time, in which he was anxious to grow good
trees and shrubs, and was in despair at the mono-
tonous way in which nurserymen contract to lay out
gardens, planting them chiefly with laurels or with
any other shrub of which they happened to have
a supply, then I should say that an afternoon at
Kew would give him many good hints. There is
sold at the gates a plan of the garden, by which
it will be seen that while shrubs of all sorts are
dotted about the garden in every direction, yet
that there are many large families of which the
different species are collected together in near
neighbourhoods, so that the visitor can decide not
only what is the best species in itself, but also —
which is of more practical consequence — the best
for his immediate purposes. Thus in one part
there is a large collection of hollies, all separately
named ; in another, a collection of maples, much
enriched of late years by the Japanese maples ;
in another, a collection of Berberis, many of them
very beautiful ; in other parts are collections of
heaths, cratcegus, roses in their many species,
mostly single, brambles, spiraea, honeysuckles, ribes,

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Our National Gardens

hydrangea, etc. ; while if he wanted a good collec-
tion of climbing plants, there is a charming collec-
tion of clematis trained to poles and chains, and
a most interesting collection of vines also trained
on poles and chains, which will be a pleasant
surprise to many whose one idea of vines is
connected with grapes.

But even if my friend wished to confine his
attention to the hardy plants, I should not keep
to the open-air garden only, especially if his own
garden was in the south or west of England. I
should certainly take him to the Temperate House.
This is a large house and a very delightful one,
filled for the most part with plants from Australia,
New Zealand, China, Japan, the Himalayas, and
other parts which produce plants which we can
often grow out of doors, but which for the most
part are doubtfully hardy. The real delight of
the house is in the luxuriance of the growth and
the way in which the plants rejoice in the tem-
perature and in the care with which they are
watched and treated. The whole space is divided
into narrow beds, with good wide paths between
them, but there is nothing stiff in this arrange-
ment, for, owing to the luxuriant growth of the
plants, it is seldom easy to see more than one
path at a time. There may be seen immense tree
ferns, palms, fuchsias to the top of the house, a large
number of climbing flowering plants, etc., while the
beautiful Sikkim rhododendrons, which seem to
revel there, are alone worth a visit in their season.

In My Vicarage Garden

I am not writing a guide to Kew Gardens ; I
am merely indicating a few salient points which
an intelligent visitor with limited time at his
command would be glad to see. But it is really
impossible to see it in one visit, and probably the
best way for any one to see it properly would be
to confine himself to the out-of-door garden on
one day, keeping the houses for another. The
houses are quite a day's work by themselves ;
indeed, no one should suppose that they have
seen Kew till they have spent many days both
in the out-door garden and in the houses. The
Water House is always pretty with different
water-lilies, papyrus, Egyptian lotus, hedychiums,
and many lovely creepers. The great palm-house
is, I believe, the finest of the sort in Europe,
and I was once told by a friend who was well
acquainted with the tropics, that nothing recalled
the tropical jungle to his memory so much as the
view in the palm-house from the upper storey ;
while the conservatory is kept constantly supplied
with different flowering plants, many of them
giving good lessons in cultivation, and very sug-
gestive for those whose delight is in the bright
colours of a well-kept conservatory.

I can say nothing of the many other houses —
space forbids ; nor can I say what I could have
wished to say about the park-like beauties of the
outer garden ; many parts of it are equal to some
of our best parks, and there are individual trees
which are unsurpassed elsewhere. Some of the

Our National Gardens

beeches are magnificent ; an oak and a Spanish
chestnut near the lake are perfect pictures. The
Salisburia near the fern-house is one of the largest
in England, but the beauty of its shape has been
spoiled by its having been originally grown
against a wall ; and not far from it is a grand
hop hornbeam — the finest I know. But to name
all the trees worth noticing would be beyond the
object of this paper.

I mentioned the museums ; they are full of
interest, and, as everything is well labelled, they
can be examined with comfort ; and to most of
us the manifold uses to which plants are put
would be surprising. The palms and bamboos
alone would give good study for an afternoon or
more ; but among the buildings two must be
mentioned. The North Gallery is comparatively
a recent acquisition, founded, built, furnished, and
endowed by the late Miss Marianne North. The
furniture consists of a complete series of paintings
of the vegetation of almost the whole world, for
the most part of a uniform size, and full of in-
struction, conveyed in the pleasantest way ; and
another complete series of polished woods from
all parts of the world. The other building I
allude to is the Herbarium, in a large red brick
building just outside the chief entrance ; and I
mention it because no account of Kew is complete
without some reference to the enormous amount
of scientific work that is carried on in that build-
ing. It is not so open to the public as the other

In My Vicarage Garden

departments, but perhaps there is no part of the
institution which does more useful work for the
public. Plants are named there for all inquirers
in the most patient and liberal way, and though
Kew generally is under the Board of Works, yet
it is much more in contact with the Colonial
Office, which sends to Kew endless inquiries about
the colonial products, and depends on Kew to
supply the colonies not only with all information
that may be useful to colonists, but even with
plants in sufficient number to enable the colonies
to start and develop new industries, such as tea
and cinchona in India.

I said that Kew was now a national garden,
by which I meant that the expenses were borne
by the nation. To some the amount granted
may seem large, but I believe it to be one of the
cheapest of our national institutions, when we
consider the size of the gardens, the great care
skilfully bestowed on them, and the very large
amount of national and colonial work carried on
there. Chancellors of the Exchequer are bound
to keep a tight hold on the national purse ; but
I never recollect the vote to Kew being disputed
in Parliament or objected to when once it had
passed the ordeal of the Treasury ; and certainly
the most economic M.P. would find it hard to
suggest any great economies at Kew, or to say
that the salaries paid to the officials were over-
paid sinecures. And Kew is not our only national
garden. Edinburgh has a beautiful garden, in

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Our National Gardens

which many plants, especially some of the New
Zealand plants, are grown in greater perfection
than they can be grown at Kew, and Ireland
has a very pretty and well-managed garden at
Glasnevin, near Dublin.

But because Kew is entirely supported at the
national cost, the public think they have a right
to growl if everything is not done to their complete
satisfaction, and in more than one particular the
growling is somewhat unreasonable. I will men-
tion two such. A demand has been frequently
made that the garden should be open to all from
the earliest hours ; it is now open to the public
at twelve and to students and others earlier, by
permission (easily obtained). One objection to
the earlier opening is that it is not only or chiefly
a pleasure garden, but above all a scientific estab-
lishment, and the earlier opening would seriously
interfere with the scientific work. But another
objection is that Kew is rapidly becoming a resi-
dential suburb of London. Numberless new
houses have been built, the population has in-
creased largely, and if the gardens were opened
in the morning they would be invaded by children
of all ages, with the necessary accompaniment of
nursemaids and perambulators, and the interfer-
ence with the work of the gardens, the greater
part of which is done in the forenoon, would be
very serious. Another growl may sometimes be
heard that people cannot get from Kew flowers
or plants to the extent that some think they are
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In My Vicarage Garden

entitled to. To this the answer is that no public
garden could admit such a claim, and that at
Kew the officials are not the owners of the plants,
but trustees for the nation, and they have no
right to give flowers or plants away merely to
please themselves by pleasing their friends. But
as trustees they have to improve and extend the
property, and when they can do so by exchange
of plants or by giving plants to others who will
help the work at Kew by growing plants which
are not easily grown there, or by helping in the
scientific study of the plants, they are not found
to be illiberal.

It is worth mentioning that gardening is
carried on at Kew under great difficulties. The
soil is a wretched one — in some places little
better than a sea-shore — and the steady increase
of houses between it and London is bringing a
large supply of London smoke. But in spite of
these and other difficulties the work goes on
steadily and successfully, and every year it seems
to be growing in popular favour ; so that on Bank
Holidays the numbers are often over eighty
thousand, and it is pleasant to record that very
little damage is done to the garden, and the
conduct of the many visitors is very rarely open
to complaint.

From what I have said it may be supposed
that I have a very high opinion of the value of
Kew as one of our best national institutions ; and
though I do not go so far as to say that every

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Our National Gardens

Londoner should go once a week there, yet I am
sure there are many who now know it not, but
would find much pleasure in a visit ; and to all
my brother-gardeners I should say, go to Kew as
often as you can, but do not go in a fault-finding
spirit, or come away with the boast that you can
grow many plants better than Kew can ; but go
to learn, go to enjoy yourself with the sight of
many treasures that you can see nowhere else,
and you will come away with the boast that
England can show a national garden which has
no equal anywhere ; a garden not only the richest
in plants, but one in which visitors are welcomed
and helped, and their comfort looked after in a
way which they will look for in vain in any public
garden outside Great Britain.

J59

CHAPTER XVII

THE FLORA OF ENGLAND EIGHTEEN HUNDRED
YEARS AGO

IF one of our British ancestors who lived in the
year A.D. 100 could now revisit his native land,
what difference would he find in the natural
features of the country? It is an interesting
question, the answer to which may tell something
of the way by which the England of our day is
what it is ; and I fix the date at A.D. i oo, because
at that time the Roman occupation was fairly
established, yet the Roman colonists had scarcely
had time to effect many changes, and for the sake
of convenience I will limit the question to the
country south of the Trent.

Of course, I put aside all human works and
buildings, and confine the question to the natural
features, and within that limit it will be found
that the changes are not so many as some of us
might fancy. The great natural features of the
country are the same, the hills, valleys, downs,
etc. In some places there have been changes of
the coast line, a gain from the sea in one place,
and a loss to the sea in another, but the effects
of such changes do not stretch far inland. Some
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The Flora of England

rivers have silted up, and are no longer navigable,
as they were in A.D. I oo and much later ; and
parts of the country which were at that time large
tracts of fen or extensive morasses or marshes,
have been converted into good and useful land,
either by artificial drainage or by natural silting
up. At that time, also, there were immense tracts
of forests, which had their uses not only in the
production of timber, but also, like the great fens,
as natural defences between one tribe and another ;
and this abundance of large forests must have had
its effect on the weather and climate, producing
certainly a larger quantity of rain all through the
year. In those respects the natural features of
the country have been changed, and the drainage
of the country and the destruction of large tracts
of forest must have had a great effect upon the
rivers ; for it is certain that more rapid though
shorter floods are now the rule, producing the
further effect of deepening the rivers, and pre-
venting the long continuance of shallow floods
on the low-lying lands adjoining the river banks,
and in that way much lessening the cold arising
from constant fogs.

These changes of the natural scenery have
done something to make the England of the
nineteenth century different from the England of
A.D. roo, but after all that is said, the changes
from this point of view, though important, are
not very many. It is very much the same if we
compare the fauna of the two periods. Some
L 161

In My Vicarage Garden

few animals have been lost from the British fauna.
It is generally agreed that the great ox or Urus —
bos primigenius — was extinct in Britain before the
Christian era, though it was certainly in existence
in the Iron age, and probably later ; whether it
still exists in our domesticated cattle is a subject
upon which naturalists are divided ; but if it does,
there can be little doubt that in A.D. 100 the
domestic cattle were more like the old Urus than
they are now. Caesar described it as still existing
in his day in the Hercynian Forest, but whether
he had ever seen it himself is not quite clear from
his description ; but he tells us it could not be
tamed. He says it was as big as an elephant,
with the colour and shape of a bull, and he says
" Magna vis eorum, et magna velocitas" (B.G. vi. 28),
and probably Pliny copied from him, describing
them as " excellenti et vi et velocitate uros" (H.N.
viii. 15). Altogether he must have been a wild
beast that we can well spare from our present
fauna. Besides the Urus, three other animals are
now missing from our fauna that were in Britain
in A.D. 100, the beaver, the bear, and the wolf.
The beaver was probably never abundant, and
was confined to a very few rivers, but it is certain
that it could still be found in some of the Welsh
rivers as late as the eighth century or later.
British bears are said by Plutarch to have been
imported into Rome, and were much admired,
but they probably only existed in the northern
parts of the country, where they are recorded as
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The Flora of England

late as the twelfth century ; in the southern parts
there is no record of them, and they are now
represented by the harmless badger. But wolves
were probably abundant ; the great forests would
have given them all the shelter they required, and
when we see how they still live and increase even
near the most civilised parts on the Continent, it
says something for the vigorous way in which
their destruction was carried out in England, that
for at least six hundred years they have entirely
disappeared, though in Ireland they still remained
till the beginning of the eighteenth century. These
are the chief large animals that mark the difference
between the two periods; all our other mammalia
are the same, some slightly altered by years of
domestic training as domestic animals, but in the
wild animals there is probably little or no difference.
In one point, however, there is a curious difference
between two animals, looking at them as articles
of food, the fox and the hare. By the early
Britons the fox was certainly eaten, while the
hare was never eaten by them — leporem gustare
fas non putant (Caes. B.G. vi. 12), as it is still not
eaten by the Laplanders ; with us the hare stands
high as a food, while I believe not even a gipsy
would eat a fox. With the birds the case is very
much the same ; there is very little difference
between the wild birds of the two periods. There
are some introductions, as the pheasant, the
turkey, and the guinea hen, and we now eat the
goose and the hen, which the ancient Briton did
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In My Vicarage Garden

not, though he kept them as domestic pets animi
voluptatisgue causa. I fear we must now look
upon the great bustard as a lost English bird,
though it has been fairly abundant in some parts
within the memory of man, but with that excep-
tion I believe we have all the wild birds that our
old British ancestors had, and that the birds we
now have are identical in every respect with the
birds of the first century. This is rather curiously
shown to us by the names of our birds, which
also show that our forefathers must have been
good observers — at least, good enough to name
the birds they saw. For nearly all of our bird-
names are not only very old names, but they rank
among the oldest words of the language; they
are old British names, very little influenced by the
names of the same birds that were familiar to the
Roman colonists of England. It is the same, too,
even with the insects ; they are probably exactly
the same with very few, if any, introductions or
losses ; and of the insects, too, the names are
very ancient. Many of our insects carry very old
names ; " chafer " and " butterfly," for instance,
occur in an eighth-century list, and " butterfly " is
a name for which even Dr Murray can give no
derivation whatever in the New Dictionary ; it
is a genuine British name without any foreign
admixture. It is the same, too, with our fishes
and reptiles.

But it is time that I said something of the
Flora of Britain Eighteen Hundred Years Ago,
164

The Flora of England

for that is the title of my paper. I said that
Britain was in many parts covered with extensive
forests ; for what was said of Buckinghamshire in
the eleventh century, abundabant eo tempore nemora
spatiosa densa et copiosa, must have been the case
to a much larger extent all over England a
thousand years earlier, though it is known that
the Romans cut down large tracts of forest for
military purposes. This abundance of forests no
longer remains to us, but the trees of which they
consisted are the same. Among these the oak
would be, as it is now, the monarch of English
trees ; and it was probably the most abundant,
for it is almost certain that the great forests were
oak forests. But the ash must have been almost
as abundant, and far more abundant in the country
south of the Trent than it is now ; this is shown
by the large number of places in southern England
which get their names from the ash, but in which
the ash is no longer the leading tree, and in many
of them it is almost extinct. These were pro-
bably the two chief forest trees of Southern
England in the earlier period I have named ;
among the less important trees were the birch,
the alder, the wych-elm (in the north more
abundantly), the maple, the willow, and perhaps
the yew. These are generally now considered to
be truly indigenous and have old British names ;
and among smaller trees the holly and the moun-
tain ash were probably abundant, the holly cer-
tainly, but the mountain ash more abundant in

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In My Vicarage Garden

the north than in the south. The great difference
in large trees between the two periods in the
south of England would be the beech, the Scotch
fir, the walnut, the Spanish chestnut, the horse
chestnut, the sycamore, and the elm, and all of
these, except the horse chestnut, may have been
introduced by the Romans. In the south of
England the Italian elm, now our common elm,
has been the chief agent in disestablishing the
ash ; and its name, in Old English, " ulm," or
" ulme," seems to be an additional proof of its
introduction by the Romans, though etymologists
now consider that " elm " is rather cognate to
ulmus than derived from it. But whenever intro-
duced it does not seem at once to have spread so
rapidly as it now does, for in Evelyn's time it was
still a scarce tree beyond Stamford. When or by
whom the sycamore was introduced into England
is not known, but it was fully established in the
sixteenth century. It grows wild in Italy, but
not far south in any abundance. The horse
chestnut is so late an introduction that it is not
admitted into the English Flora, even as a
naturalised plant ; yet it is a European plant,
being found in the Pindus range of mountains in
Turkey, and it was introduced into England in
the sixteenth century from the Levant. Like the
sycamore, it found a congenial soil and climate in
England, and soon so firmly established itself that
Evelyn, writing in 1662, said of it : — " It grows
so goodly a tree in competent time, that by this

166

The Flora of England

alone, we might have ample encouragement to
denizen other strangers amongst us." It is in no
way related to the Spanish chestnut, but the
similar appearance of the fruits gave the name,
while their uselessness was emphasised by the
prefix " horse." The walnut is not even a native
of Europe, though there can be little doubt that
it was introduced into England by the Romans,
and took kindly to the soil, and at once pro-
claimed its foreign origin by its name of walnut,
originally welch-nut, a name which it still keeps
in some parts of England. The Spanish chestnut
speaks for itself that it is a foreigner, and the two
remaining trees, the beech and the Scotch fir, are
especially interesting, because Caesar expressly
says that the beech and the Abies are the only
Gallic trees that were not in Britain ; but what
he meant by Abies is by no means certain and
cannot be discussed here. What is certain is that
we have now large beech woods, especially in the
chalk districts, some of which may have taken the
place of the older oak forests, and that in the
south we have large tracts entirely occupied by
the Scotch fir, that, if unchecked by browsing and
other means, would very soon overgrow all other
vegetation. The extreme rapidity with which
the Scotch fir takes possession of a country, when
left to itself, is very pleasantly told by Charles
Kingsley, in his Winter Garden — {Miscellanies ',
vol. i.).

" Thousands perish yearly," he says, " but the eastward
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In My Vicarage Garden

march of the whole, up hill and down dale is sure and
steady, till as you stand upon some eminence you see
stretching to the eastward of each tract of older trees a
long cloud of younger ones, like a green comet's tail."

The forest trees have detained me too long, for
I must say something of the fruit trees and
vegetables. I have already mentioned the walnut
and Spanish chestnut as foreign trees, which were
certainly not in Britain in A.D. 100. We can
certainly say the same of the almond, apricot, fig,
medlar, mulberry, nectarine, peach, pear, quince,
most of which were introduced in the sixteenth
century, though the pear, and perhaps the fig, may
have been introduced by the Romans. The com-
mon fruits, apple, gooseberry, currants, raspberries,
and strawberries, are all descended from our native
fruits.

In vegetables there has been a great change,
for the vegetable garden of the ancient Briton
must have been very poorly supplied, and pro-
bably he paid very little attention to it. The
Roman colonists may have made him acquainted
with peas, beans, and onions, but the bulk of our
present vegetables date from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and it is a curious thing
that with all our commerce with foreign countries,
and the strong desire to get new things, scarcely
one new vegetable has really been established
among us since that date. The rhubarb was
introduced as a culinary vegetable during the last
century, but the plant was grown in England long

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The Flora of England

before ; and for three hundred years no vegetable
has been introduced that can in any degree com-
pare with the results, commercial, agricultural, and
even political, of the potato. Nor can it even be
said that the vegetables as now grown are very
different or much better than those grown by our
forefathers. In a few instances varieties have
been introduced which are more prolific, or in
some respects more profitable, but in spite of the
nurserymen, whose catalogues announce novelties
and improvements every year, the plants prac-
tically remain very much the same, and those
who can look back fifty years or more are very
positive in their assertions that the peas, asparagus,
potatoes, etc., which they ate in their youth, were
in no way inferior to what they get now ; some
even will go further, and say that they were
superior, for that now everything, flavour included,
is sacrificed to size.

I have left myself too small a place to speak,
as I should have wished, of the native Flora other
than trees and vegetables, but I must not pass it
by altogether. I do not suppose that the ancient
Briton was much given to ornamental or pleasure
gardening. The necessities of life would have
compelled him, when he was not hunting the wild
animals for food, to give his attention almost
entirely to the plants that were necessary for his
daily bread, such as wheat, barley and oats. Nor
do I suppose that he gave much heed to his
native Flora, except so far as he could find plants
169

In My Vicarage Garden

good for food ; but he did observe some of the
native plants, enough at least to name them, for
we still have plant names which are genuine old
English, not Roman or Saxon. But if he did
observe them at all, he would still find them now,
for I believe there is not a single plant that has
been completely lost to the British Flora. We
hear, indeed, much complaining of the wholesale
extirpation of plants ruthlessly dug up for sale,
but though such extirpation is very grievous to
those who suffer from it, it is confined to a few
spots, and the plant as a British species is not
lost. The beautiful Cypripedium Calceolus can
only be found in very few spots, perhaps only in
one, but it never can have been abundant ; never
sufficiently abundant to make any perceptible
effect on the colour or vegetation of its native
habitats. It is a most difficult thing entirely to
extirpate a truly native plant anywhere ; it is
almost an impossibility. Nature is very bountiful,
and if at any time appearances point to de-
struction, she is reserving her powers to bring in
life again. The appearance and disappearance of
flowers is one of the mysteries of plant life. Every
collector knows that in some years he will find in
fair abundance a plant that he has long looked
for in vain ; he finds it one year, and then perhaps
it is many years before he sees it again. And I
feel sure that none of the wild plants which grew
in England in A.D. I oo have entirely disappeared ;
they have, of course, been expelled from some

170

The Flora of England

places by the growth of towns, and by cultivation,
but that is all ; they still carry on the battle of
life elsewhere. But if the flora of ancient Britain
still exists, it has been largely increased. If we
go to any good British Flora, such as Hooker's
or Babington's, we shall find so many species
marked as aliens or introductions, that though I
have not counted them, I feel sure that I am
right in saying that at least one-eighth or more
of the plants which now fairly find a place in
British Floras are not really indigenous. These
strangers have come to us in many ways. Many
are garden escapes, some come from the ballast
heaps on the sea coast, some may have been
brought by birds, who are everywhere great
distributors of seeds, and some, as on the West
Coast of Ireland, are waifs from the Atlantic.
Without going minutely into these, I will mention
a very few conspicuous strangers, to show how
our Flora is gradually being enriched. The great
evening primrose of the coast of Lancashire is
undoubtedly a garden escape, and so is the sweet-
scented coltsfoot, so valuable as one of our earliest
spring flowers. The lily of the valley is a very
doubtful native, while the snowdrop is certainly
a foreigner, and where found apparently wild is
probably a survivor from some old mediaeval
garden. And I have always felt certain that the
white water lily is not a true British native south
of the Trent, though a true native in Scotland.
My proof is only negative, but I cannot fancy
171

In My Vicarage Garden

that such a flower could have escaped the notice
of all our old writers. How could Shakespeare
have missed it, if it was as abundant in his time
in Warwickshire as it is now? He must have
named it, if he had ever seen it in rivers,
as one of Ophelia's flowers, or even as one
that

" Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death."

Or how could Isaak Walton have overlooked it
when he was writing so lovingly of rivers and of
everything that lived in them ?

I come back to the question with which I
started. What difference would a Briton who
lived in A.D. 100 find in the natural scenery of
England if he could re-visit it ? He would find
many differences, at first sight a great many ; but
a closer view would show him that though there
were many additions, the Britain of the nineteenth
century was not so very unlike the Britain of the
first, and he would soon recognise many well-
known and familiar features in the scenery, the
animals, and the plants. How would it be with
the inhabitants? Would he recognise as his
family descendants the Englishmen of the present
day, changed as they must have been by admix-
ture with Roman, Danish, Saxon, and Norman
parents ? I think with a little trouble he might.
And to go deeper still, would he recognise in the
present moral character of Englishmen any re-

172

The Flora of England

semblance to the character of his own brethren,
and relations, and neighbours among whom he
lived ? To that I cannot answer. I would rather
take refuge in Horatio's evasive answer to Hamlet :
" 'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so."

173

PART III
ELSEWHERE

SWITZERLAND AND SHAKESPEARE

'75

CHAPTER XVIII
IN WILD SWISS GARDENS

I HAVE been for a short three weeks in the
Bernese Oberland, dividing the time between
Thun, St Beattenberg, Grindelwald, and Miirren.
Of these places and the glorious scenery I shall
say nothing ; it is of the flowers that I wish to
speak, and with a special object.

Before I left England I was told by many
friends that September was much too late for the
Alpine flowers ; but I did not fully believe this,
for I had had a former pleasant experience that
there was much to see and admire in the Alpine
flora of August, and I felt sure that I should not
find September all barren. Of course, I did not
expect to see the flowers of May and June ; I
could not hope for primulas, or even for some of
the gentians ; but I went in the full faith that
there was a goodly autumnal flora, and I have
not been disappointed.

As soon as we entered the Jura and had left
the dreary plain of France behind us, we were at
once greeted by Astrantia major and the rich
blue flowers of Mulgedium Alpinum, both grow-
ing close to the railway, and as we got amongst

M 177

In My Vicarage Garden

the true Alpine pastures it was clear from their
colours that they held many flowers. The first
true Alpines that we gathered were on our
first walk from Thun to St Beattenberg. On the
banks of the lake were the elegant Anthericum
ramosum in fair abundance and in full flower, and
the pretty little Saxifage, 6". aizoides, chiefly the
autumnal form with orange dots upon the yellow
petals, a very handsome little flower and one very
easily grown. This bright Saxifrage followed us
everywhere ; it was on the low grounds near Thun
and Interlaken, it was high up even to the snow
line, and on the moraine of the glacier of Gsalpen-
thorn, where the moraine is so shallow that in
walking over it my alpenstock frequently struck
the ice beneath, there was the Saxifrage with a
few other plants, their roots actually touching the
ice, and so showing that they loved the moisture
more than they dreaded the cold. Through
the wood between the Lake of Thun and St
Beattenberg I found plenty of orchids past their
flowering, and I only found one spike of tway
blade ; but I knew I should be too late for the
orchids. The most abundant plant was the grass
of Parnassus, which very much surprised me, for
in England I do not remember to have seen it
away from marshy and damp places ; but in
Switzerland it was everywhere, even in the driest
places on the edges of precipices. I found it in
such abundance all the way up from the Lake of
Thun to the top of Gwennenalphorn (6770 feet)

In Wild Swiss Gardens

that I am sure I could have picked specimens
every yard of the way ; our British Prunella
vulgaris was almost as abundant, and equally
careless whether it grew at a high or a low eleva-
tion. The monkshood also has a very wide range :
on ^the lower levels it had evidently long past
flowering, but on the higher elevations it was still
abundant and very handsome. Just under the top
of the Gwennenalphorn I came upon several
circular pits, two or three yards wide and perhaps
a yard across, caused, I suppose, by some natural
subsidence of the soil ; these pits were filled with
monkshood in full flower and of a very deep
colour, and the circular shape of the pits crammed
with the flowers gave them almost the appearance
of artificial flower-beds. On the very top of the
same Horn I found good flowering tufts of the
lovely Saxifraga coesia ; some good plants of
Achillea moschata, also in flower ; plenty of the
pretty Astrantia minor, which I look at with
envy, for I never succeeded in growing it, and I
know of no one in England who has been really
successful with it ; while the very top was a thick
bed of peat carpeted with Azalea procumbeus still
carrying a few flowers. Very near the top I found
a few good bunches of the Alpen rose, a shrub
that always interests me, because, as far as I
know, it is the only hardy rhododendron, except
R. Davuricum (probably only a geographical
variety), which will grow in calcareous soil. I
have old plants in my Gloucestershire garden,
179

In My Vicarage Garden

which in some years flower well ; but though
quite hardy it is rather capricious in its flowering.
In the flowering season the Alpenrose must be
quite the glory of the Oberland, for it seems to
be everywhere and to be most luxuriant. In a
walk from the little Scheidegg (6788 feet) I must
have passed hundreds of acres of it, growing so
thickly that I should think it impossible for any-
thing else to grow with it, and, apparently, neither
cattle, sheep, nor goats browse on it. Near the
same horn (Gwennenalphorn) I was pleased to
meet with a few flowers of the Gentiana Bavarica
and some plants of the pretty pink umbellifer,
Pimpinella rubra, at that height a compact plant,
and well worth growing in the garden if it would
keep that habit. Of course, there were many
plants not in flower, but which it was pleasant to
see and recognise, such as Primula auricula, P.
viscosa, P. farinosa, and probably others, Soldan-
ella in abundance, Tussilayo alpina, Maiantheum
bifolium, Saxifraga rotundifolia, etc. ; but I was
surprised at the almost entire absence of the
sempervivums and sedums. I had hoped to see
plenty of the cobweb sempervivum, which is
almost as beautiful without its red flower ; but I
only found a few specimens near Miirren, and
not one of any other species, and their absence
surprised me.

I have said that I did not expect to see many
gentians ; but I have seen more than I expected.
Besides the G. Bavarica just mentioned, and of
1 80

In Wild Swiss Gardens

which I found a few more flowers in other parts,
the handsome G. asclepiadea was abundant in
many places, and at its best ; and, in a wood on
the slopes of the Mettenberg, I met with a very
beautiful variety, in which all the leaves were in
the same plane, with the flowers on one side only
of the flower-stem (technically secund}, and of the
most delicate pale-blue colour. Close to the upper
glacier, between the Wetterhorn and the Metten-
berg, I came upon a complete bed of the G. ciliata
in full bloom, and I think this almost the most
beautiful of the dwarf gentians. Its colour is a
deep sapphire, as rich as in G. vernci, but each
petal has a fringe of hairs, from which it gets its
specific name, and which adds largely to its
beauty. There was in many places an abundance
of the annual G. Germanica, but its dull colour
makes it the least attractive of the gentians. Near
the Grindelwald glaciers the ground was in many
places quite carpeted with the Dryas odopetala,
but the season for flowering had long past ; I
saw, however, some in good flower near the lower
glacier, and still more almost close to the ice of
the Gsalpenthorn glacier, and a good many on the
high ground near the little Scheidegg, where I
also found a wonderful specimen of " English as
she is spoke." On a large official board outside
the Scheidegg station was a notice in German
and English, the English being : " Here is gratis
to see the oldest Miss of the world" — i.e. the
Jungfrau.

181

In My Vicarage Garden

I said that the pastures showed by their colours
that the time for flowers was not yet over. The
prevailing colours were blue and pink, the blue
given by a campanula, and the pink by a col-
chicum. The campanula (C. Scheuzeri) is very
like our harebell, but it has rather larger flowers,
which are nodding and not upright, and it has not
the round radical leaves which give ours its specific
name (C. rotundifolia), and so is botanically dis-
tinct. The pink colchicum is slightly different
from our British plant, and is C. Alpinum, and it
is everywhere in the pastures, and its abundance
in them puzzles me. In England the colchicum,
or meadow saffron, is considered almost poisonous
to cattle, yet in Switzerland, where the pastures
are being mowed all the year round, the cattle
must eat it in every stage. It is a favourite
flower for visitors to pick ; they bring in large
bunches, which soon fade, and they call them
crocuses, but it is not a crocus, and differs in many
ways which I need not state particularly ; and,
according to the Swiss botanist, Dalla-Torre, there
is no native crocus in Switzerland. But in nothing
does the crocus more differ from the Colchicum
than in its medical qualities. No crocus is hurt-
ful, and as the producer of saffron the crocus
ranks among the wholesome plants ; while the
poisonous character of the Colchicum may be
gathered from the fact that its near botanical ally
is the black Hellebore, or Veratrum, from which
the strong narcotic poison, Veratrine, is extracted.

182

In Wild Swiss Gardens

When the large leaves, carrying with them the
triangular fruit, appear in the spring, this relation-
ship is more apparent ; in the autumn the pretty
flowers look innocent enough, and are a great
ornament in the pastures. There is a little ex-
ternal interest attaching to the Colchicum, for its
selection by Paley in his Natural Theology as a
striking instance of design. I have not the book
at hand to refer to, and it is of little consequence,
as I am sure there is not a plant that grows from
which the same lesson could not be taught. One
other plant of the pastures must be mentioned,
though it was almost out of flower, a stately
yellow thistle (C. spinosissiinus), standing about a
yard high, which seemed succulent and not out of
place in the pastures.

If September is a little too late for an abundance
of the wild flowers of Switzerland, we can at least
find the flowers turned to fruit, and in many cases
the fruits are very beautiful. I found wild straw-
berries, raspberries, and wortleberries, but not in
abundance ; the bright red berries of the bearberry
were everywhere, but I have seen bushes better
covered in Scotland ; the red-fruited elder does not
seem to be as abundant in the Oberland as in other
parts, and I only found one grand bush in fruit
near Miirren ; but its place was well supplied by
the scarlet fruits of the barberry, which were in
great beauty ; but the bushes seemed to be much
smaller than our English bushes. But there were
two plants in seed which were the admiration of

183

In My Vicarage Garden

everybody. One I saw only in the wood through
which the queer funicular railway runs from
Lauterbrunnen to Miirren, and it had the appear-
ance of long sprays of delicate white feathers
covering a largish tract amongst the bushes.
They were most beautiful, yet they were only
our large willow-herb in seed. It is not un-
common in England, and abounds in some of
the valleys of the Cotswold, but I never saw it in
such a beautiful state before, though I am told it
is as beautiful in some parts of Surrey. The
other plant was the dwarf thistle (C. acaulis],
which when in flower is simply a purple dwarf
thistle of no special beauty, but when the flower
is over it is most beautiful. The involucre lies
flat upon the grass, a bright, many-rayed star
(three or four inches in diameter), with a
sheen like burnished silver, and I was not
surprised to see that many visitors, especially
ladies, picked it in quantity and admired it,
though only a thistle. It is often compared to
the Edelweiss, but in my eyes it is far more
beautiful, for I could never very much admire the
Edelweiss, which has always seemed to me some-
thing of an impostor that has won for itself a high
reputation under false pretences. Its chief claim
was the sentimental one that it was so difficult to
find that each Swiss youth risked his life to find
it and present it to his sweetheart as a proof of
his manly prowess ; it is now known to grow in
many places where any boy or girl can reach it

184

In Wild Swiss Gardens

without difficulty. Then it was said to be impos-
sible to grow it away from its native mountains ;
it is now found to be easily grown in England, if
raised from seed. It is claimed, too, to be a flower
of supreme beauty ; but the white star, which
forms its chief attraction, is not a flower at all, but
the involucre which surrounds a number of small
insignificant flowers, and it is not a pure white,
but in colour, as in texture, it looks like a piece
of rather dirty white felt. So, altogether, I prefer
the dwarf thistle in seed ; and if anyone will take
the trouble to pull this to pieces and examine it
under a moderate lens he will see that each
pappus is a lovely little parachute, of which each
hair is a perfect feather of the finest silk. And
before leaving the fruits I must mention one
more which much interested me, our groomwell
(Lithospermum}) which I found in some of the
woods in great abundance. The interest lay in
this, that much of the shagreen from which our
grandmothers' spectacle and etui cases were made
was a manufactured article from asses' skin, into
which were pressed hard seeds chiefly of the
Lithospermum. As this is rather a rare plant in
England, I never could understand where the
supply of seeds came from ; but now having seen
it in such abundance in the woods of Switzerland,
I can well fancy that the supply may have come
from thence.

I need not say anything about the ferns ; their
beauty is to a large extent independent of the

185

In My Vicarage Garden

season, and their beauty, variety, and abundance
are as great in the autumn as in the summer.
Nor do I say anything about the cultivated
gardens. The Swiss cottager cares little for a
flower-garden ; his energies are all spent on vege-
tables, and his vegetable-garden is generally untidy
and ill kept. The only place in which he shows
a love for flowers is in his window-gardening, and
sometimes this is done very well indeed. I saw
in a chalet window near Meringen two large pots
of Portulacca which would have won a prize at
a London flower show ; they were beautiful in
themselves, and excellent specimens of good
cultivation. But of home gardens I have seen
little to admire except at some of the great
hotels — at Interlaken especially, but also at Thun.
These were really fine specimens of good garden-
ing, and show what could be done in that climate
with very little care ; the immense bushes of
geraniums of all sorts and of Althaa hibiscus
were quite magnificent.

There were many other good flowers and fruits
besides the few I have named ; but even if I
named them all I could not, and I do not mean
to, say that the Alpine flora of September will
bear any comparison with that of June and July.
Many of the plants have long past flowering, and
of those that remain a large number are also
British plants. But my point is that if any lover
of plants, and especially of Alpines, should be
prevented from going to Switzerland earlier in the

186

In Wild Swiss Gardens

year, he need not give it up altogether under the
idea that he will see nothing to repay him for his
long journey. He will see a great deal. The
grand features of the country ; the everlasting
hills changing every day and almost every hour,
and yet always the same ; the mighty precipices ;
the deeply interesting glaciers ; the lovely slopes,
rocky or grassy, leading down to blue lakes or
green valleys ; the sweet woods and the water-
falls— all these will be as good to him in Septem-
ber as in June. And if he has an eye for plants,
and a love for them, with just sufficient botanical
knowledge to know something of them, even when
their flowers are gone and perhaps even when past
their seed-time, I can assure him that in every
walk he will find something new, something that
he has not seen in England, and something that
will interest him at the time, and bring pleasant
memories to him in days to come. In his walks
he will find the alpenstock a very efficient help
in taking up plants, and especially in dislodging
them from places a little beyond his reach ; and I
can strongly recommend to him, as a pocket
companion, The Tourists' Guide to the Flora of
the Alps, written in German by Professor Delia-
Torre, but translated by Dr Bennett, and sold in
London. It is most trustworthy, and its only
fault is that it is too concise. It is purposely so,
in order to reduce the size ; but rather longer
descriptions would be welcome, even at the cost
of a slight increase in size.
187

In My Vicarage Garden

In one point only — I cannot quite pass it by —
the Bernese Oberland is not altogether pleasant
to the English Churchman. I was there three
Sundays — one at Thun, one at Grindelwald, and
one at Miirren, and in all three, neither the
buildings or the services are what might be
expected from the hundreds of English visitors
who come there every year. In this dearth of
proper buildings it is a comfort to feel that
the whole country is one grand temple in which
is preached with no uncertain sound the majesty
and the goodness of Him, Whose we are, and
Whom we serve. " Altitudines montium Ipsius
sunt " is the feeling that can never long be absent
from us, and the many references to the hills and
mountains and the lessons they teach which
abound in the Psalms and the Prophets come
back to us with new force and value. Yet the
" hills which stand round about Jerusalem " are as
nothing compared to the mountains of Switzer-
land ; even the glory of Lebanon, the Mont Blanc
of Syria, though a snow mountain, is little more
than half the height of the Mont Blanc of
Switzerland, and no Jewish Prophet or Psalmist
could have seen or known anything of the wonder-
ful mysteries of the glaciers ; they had passed
away from Lebanon and Syria long before the
day of Prophet or Psalmist, but we know that
they were there once, for the cedars of Lebanon
now grow on an ancient glacial moraine.

188

CHAPTER XIX
riORA

IF any readers of the Guardian are in search of a
place in Switzerland where they will find quiet
rest in the midst of beautiful scenery and abun-
dance of flowers I would recommend them to go
to Piora. It is very easily reached. If they are
in a hurry they can go from Luzern to Airolo in
less than four hours ; but if they can spare the
time they would be well repaid if they took the
route from Luzern to Fluellen and Goschenen,
then by omnibus to Hospenthal and walk over the
St Gothard Pass. This is a walk that is now
very seldom taken, but it is a grand walk and an
easy one ; and though the two miles on each side
of the Hospice are barren and desolate, there is
not a yard of the road without some object of
interest. The road itself and the Simplon are
the finest pieces of road-engineering in Europe,
and it is kept in beautiful order, though the
traffic must now be very largely diminished since
the opening of the St Gothard Tunnel. The
view on the southern descent when we first look
into the Val Tremola is a view that none will
forget when once seen. The long road made in
a succession of corkscrew turns has quite a weird
189

In My Vicarage Garden

look, and seems as if a giant had amused himself
by making gigantic flourishes on the rocks. But
the result of the flourishes is that the walker finds
the descent very easy ; he has a good road under
him, a brawling and beautiful stream — the Ticino
— by his side all the way, with grand rocks and
good plants. It is not, however, a walk to be
undertaken too early in the season ; it was the
first week in July when I took it, and in many
places the road was cut through deep snow ; the
pretty little Lac Lucendro was unapproachable,
and the lake itself frozen over and covered with
snow, and the Ticino in many places completely
bridged over with snow for considerable distances.
The corkscrews of the road are carried on almost
into Airolo, but near Airolo they are of greater
length, and the short cuts can be taken with safety
and ease. At Airolo there is more than one good
hotel, but any one who wishes to go to Piora
would do well to go to the Hotel Lombardi, as
the landlord, M. Lombardi, is the landlord of the
hotel at Piora, as he is also of the hotel at the top
of the St Gothard Pass. The ascent to Piora is
not for wheels of any sort. Very soon after leaving
Airolo we commence to mount by a good mule
path, and for the first half of the way the path
is not at all steep ; but after passing the little
villages of Madrano and Brugnasco we reach
Altanca, where the ascent begins to be steep, and
in some places a little scrambly, but very delight-
ful as it goes by a succession of zigzags parallel

190

Piora

with the pretty stream of the Fossbach, which
descends rapidly and in a succession of grand
waterfalls from Lac Rhitom into the Ticino. The
finest of the waterfalls is close to Piora, and the
lover of good flowers will be delighted to see the
two steep sides of the gorge studded with white
patches, which are the flowering spikes of the finest
of all Alpine saxifrages, 5. cotyledon, that seems
only to reach its fullest beauty where it can find
bare rocks within reach of the spray of a water-
fall. The mount from Airolo took me a little
under four hours ; a good walker would do it in
half-an-hour less, or even an hour less, if he
was walking against time, which I was not.
Ladies are sometimes taken up on horses or a
chaise a porteur \ but the walk is quite prac-
ticable for ladies, and I found no real difficulty
in the walk up or down, though I confess to
having been glad when the walk came to its
end.

The Hotel Piora is placed at the very edge of
the lake ; it is the only house in the neighbour-
hood, and it is a small hotel, so that those who
wish to go there must order their rooms some
days beforehand. But when once there the visitor
will soon find that it is a place to stay in, and
will not be in a hurry to go from it, unless,
perhaps, the weather is very bad ; and, though
I only experienced it for one day, I believe that
on many days the place is clouded with mist,
sometimes for days together. I would gladly have
191

In My Vicarage Garden

stayed longer, and will now tell what reasons I
have for recommending the place.

I said that I should recommend it to those who
are in search of quiet rest. It is not suited for
those who want to get in the midst of Alpine
scenery large tables dyhote> picnics, and full-dress
promenades ; they will find what they want better
at Luzern or Interlaken. But for those who, like
myself, wished for quiet and rest but not solitude,
I can imagine no place that will better suit their
wishes. The hotel is a small one, and during the
week I was there I suppose we were never above
twenty; but that is not all. While I was there
the company that I met was not only a small
company, but to me a very pleasant and very
sociable one. Of course, there was the inevitable
bride and bridegroom on their wedding tour, who
kept themselves apart, but I always rather like
their company if there are not too many of them ;
and I like to watch them as far as I can do so
without distressing them. The watching may
have in it some regret for the days that are no
more ; but it is a pleasure to see two young
people so thoroughly all in all to each other, that
mountains and flowers are very small items in
their happiness ; and it is pleasant to think that
to them, too, the mountains and flowers are
teachers, and that the time is not far off when to
them Piora and such like places will be a delight-
ful memory that will beckon them back again ;
and then, coming with fuller years and larger
192

Piora

interests, the mountains and flowers will give a
happiness and teach them many a delightful
lesson which they could not see or listen to before.
But these formed a very small portion of the
company; the rest were all gentlemen and ladies,
each with some favourite pursuit carried out in
almost a serious way, yet not so serious as to
shut out the idea that they were all taking a well-
earned holiday, and having a perhaps needed rest.
Most were flower-lovers, perhaps all were more or
less ; and some had a real knowledge of plants ;
others were geologists and crystal-hunters ; all
seemed to have some steady, sensible pursuit, and
all seemed to be glad to contribute of their
knowledge to the rest. Whatever flower I brought
in and could not name, I had no difficulty in
getting its name from someone else, and I never
got from any the slightest idea that I was
troubling them with my questions. In that way
the place was to me an ideal place for rest and
recruiting ; while each went his or her own way
on their pursuit they were all ready to help and
take interest in the pursuits of others. I may
have been exceptionally lucky in the company
I met, but I am told that the company at Piora
always consists rather largely of scientists, who
find there a good field of research.

Another point which to me is a strong recom-
mendation of Piora is that all the walks are
within easy distance of the hotel — in fact, they
are for the most part close — so that it is not
N 193

In My Vicarage Garden

necessary to walk three or four miles before you
come to the object of your walk. The lake is
surrounded by fine mountain peaks, each of which
will give a good walk. The ascent of Taneda
(8760 ft.) will require the best part of a whole
day, especially if, as it generally is early in July,
the route is blocked in many places by deep
snow ; and there are many other good points
which will require all the time between breakfast
and dinner. But for those who do not wish for,
or cannot take, such long walks, there are many
delightful excursions close at hand. The Fongio
rises from the very walls of the hotel, and you
may do as much or as little of it as you like ;
each step is varied both in flowers and view.
Within a hundred yards of the hotel door you may
be among alpines that will delight any lover of
such plants ; and you may with ease go on to the
top (7257 ft), and at each turning in the path the
view and the plants will change ; or you may come
down after having made half of the ascent well-
satisfied with your walk. I think one of the
pleasantest walks I took was all round the lake,
making a walk little over three miles. As you
look on the lake from the hotel windows, you
see, as it is usual in most Alpine lakes, that
the south side with a northern aspect is well
clothed with trees and bushes, while the north side
with a southern aspect is apparently bare and
barren — but it is only apparently so ; both sides
are well supplied with flowers, but of a different

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sort. I walked first along the low ground of the
south side (northern aspect) ; it had an under-
growth of Alpine rose with a thin wood of
scattered firs ; and among this undergrowth was
a rich growth of flowers, many of tall growth such
as Veratrum, the taller gentians, and monkshood.
The top of the lake was a marshy meadow
formed in the silt from the mountains, with two
small streams. One of these I had to wade, and
found the barefooted walking so pleasant that I
continued through the rest of the marshy meadow,
and made a discovery which I had not noticed
before. The river that I waded was icy cold ;
the grasses and sedges were pleasant but a little
rough ; but the masses of sphagnum were very
pleasant, and perceptibly warm to the feet. This
warmth of the sphagnum is a puzzle which I
cannot solve. I can only suppose that the hot
sun warms the water in the sphagnum, and that
it does not readily part with the heat so gained.
The marshy meadow was full of good marsh
plants. The walk home was along the north side
(south aspect) which looks entirely bare and
barren ; yet every foot has its good flowers, but
all of a low growth. I think this ease of reaching
good points both for views and plants is a very
great recommendation to Piora.

But it is time to come to the flowers ; and in
speaking of them I feel almost compelled to speak
in what might well be called exaggeration and a
too great use of superlatives ; but it is really

In My Vicarage Garden

impossible to speak of the flowers of Piora
without using superlatives and what seems like
exaggeration. Before I left England I had been
told by more than one friend well versed in flowers
generally, and especially in Alpine flowers, that in
no part should I find such a paradise of flowers
as at Piora. So I went in faith, and they really
far exceeded my wildest expectations. I took with
me Gremli's Swiss Flora for Tourists, published
in English by Nutt, in the Strand — a most excellent
little book which I can strongly recommend to all
who go to Switzerland in search of flowers. I
can also recommend, but not so highly, Correvon's
Flore Coloriee de Poche, published in Paris. It
has some fairly good plates, which are helpful, but
it only records the more conspicuous flowers, and
is not exhaustive as Gremli's is. Now Gremli
describes 2637 Swiss plants, including ferns and
grasses, but without the mosses, fungi, and lichens,
which of themselves must be a study ; and I feel
quite sure that within a radius of three miles or
less from the hotel it would be quite possible for
a good searcher to find more that one-half of these
2637 plants. I was not searching for plants ; I
simply admired and gathered those that were near
the paths in my walks ; and yet the number of
different plants that I saw — many of them seen
wild for the first time — were a constant delight,
and a delight that was varied every day and in
every walk. It was not only the large number of
species, out it was the large number of the in-

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dividuals of many species that was to me so
remarkable and noteworthy. I will name a few.
The Gentiana acaulis was a little past its best, but
it was abundant ; and I am not exaggerating
when I say that during the week I was there I
must have walked over acres of the gem-like G.
Bavarica. I had no idea that I could anywhere
see it in such masses ; and it seemed to be in no
way particular as to its position ; it was abundant,
and perhaps most abundant, in the damp ground
near the lakes, but it was also in many high
places. The whole place was especially rich in
gentians ; besides the G. acaulis and Bavarica,
there was G. lutea, cruciata, punctata, asclepiadea
(not yet in flower), and Germanica. This last one
I was especially pleased to see ; it is a British
plant, and I know it well, especially on the Cots-
wolds. But there is a great difference between
the British and the Swiss plants, and it is a
difference which shows how largely the colour of
flowers is affected by their soil, situation, and
especially, perhaps, their elevation. In England
the flower is a pale blue : at Piora the colour is
all brilliant as that of G. Bavarica, which it so
much resembles at first sight, that it is not till
you take the plant in your hands and see that
it has an annual root, and that it has many
flowers in its little stem instead of the one flower
that G. Bavarica carries, that you see the differ-
ence. As with G. Bavarica, so it was also with
the bird's-eye primrose (P. farinosd). It was
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In My Vicarage Garden

everywhere in hundreds, and you could not help
treading on the little beauty. I do not think it
was finer than I have seen it at Malham and
Ingleborough in Yorkshire ; but I saw many
specimens of a far richer and deeper colour than
I have seen in England. The Alpine rose was
everywhere, and was in its fullest beauty at that
high elevation, though near Hospenthal it was
almost past flowering. I delight in the alpenrose,
lot only for its bright flowers, which give such a
colour to so many Swiss hillsides, but because it
is the only rhododendron (except J?. Dahuricum,
which some consider only a geographical variety)
that will grow on soil charged with lime. To me
the faint smell is rather pleasant, though to some
it is quite unpleasant ; and at Piora I learned two
facts about it which I had not noted before.
There is everywhere wet, marshy ground on the
hillsides, not bad enough to stop a walker, but
enough to make his feet damp. I noticed that
wherever I could see an Alpenrose the walking
was good and firm, though it may have appeared
to be growing in a marsh. The other thing I
learnt about it was that it gives most valuable
protection to many plants. I suppose it is not
grazed by cattle, sheep, or goats, and the result is
that many good plants come up right in the
midst of the bushes, and, I suppose, protected by
them. I found many grand specimens of Aqui-
legia alpina so growing ; also Streptopus amplexi-
caulis and others ; and nestling round the outside

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Piora

of the bushes, and well protected by them, I
found Maianthemum bifolium, Pyrola rotundifolia,
and other gems. And I think it was worth all
the journey to Piora if only to see the St Bruno's
lily (Paradisia liliastrum) in flowers. The first
flowers were showing themselves when I was
there ; but I am told that when in full flower the
hillsides are white with them, and that they can
be gathered in sheaves. I have grown it for
many years and admired it, but I never realised
its supreme beauty till I saw it on its native hill-
sides. There surely can be no flower more
thoroughly beautiful, while the whiteness of the
flowers is the nearest approach to absolute purity
that can be conceived. I shall never forget it
as I saw it first at Piora. Growing with the
St Bruno's lily, and in many other places, was a
large quantity of the fine yellow Alpine anemone
(A. sulphured], which I had seen before in its full
beauty on the Furka Pass, where one hillside was
so covered with it that at a considerable distance
the whole hillside looked yellow ; but at Piora
the time of flowering was past yet the beauty was
not gone, for the heads with their many- feathered
seeds were very beautiful.

It is very tempting to say more of the many
beautiful flowers that I saw, but time and space
would fail me ; but there is one plant that I must
on no account pass by. The Cobweb Sempervivum
(S. arachnoideum) is everywhere, clinging to chinks
in the rocks, and of wonderful beauty ; there were
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In My Vicarage Garden

many small patches of it which I could only com-
pare to brooches set with brilliant jewels ; the
outside of each rosette being a pale rose, and the
inside a glittering spot formed by the cobweb
that joins together every leaflet of each rosette.
This likeness is increased by the fact that on all
that I saw at Piora the rosettes were very small,
and unopened except to a small extent. I fancy
that later in the year the rosettes expand and be-
come flat, but they are so closely packed that it
is hard to see how they can find room to expand.
I was none the less glad to see the little beauty
growing in such abundance and beauty, because
I have never thoroughly succeeded in growing
it. In England it is a most capricious plant,
growing well in one garden, and in another, with
apparently the same surroundings, utterly refusing
to live. And I must add another charm that the
flowers give to the walks at Piora — there is an
abundance of sweet-scented flowers. Among these
there are two small orchids of very delicate and
pleasant smell, the little black orchid, nigritella
angustifolia, and the gymnadenia odoratissima ;
the nigritella being fairly abundant and the
gymnadenia not so frequently met with. These,
however, do not give out their scent till sought
for, and so do not account for the pleasant smells
that are met with in the walks unsought. Much
of this comes from the Alpenrose, and after rain
the sweetbriar bushes scattered through the woods
give out their well-known scent ; but there are
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Piora

two low-growing plants which, as I think, fully
account for the pleasant scents. The one is our
own thyme, which is everywhere, but I think the
chief scent is given out by the pretty Alpine
milfoil, Achillea moschata ; it is very abundant,
and when crushed gives an aromatic musky
smell.

For plant-collectors, as distinguished from plant-
lovers, Piora is a delightful place. I was not
collecting plants ; I was simply looking for them
to see them in their native habitats and to admire
them in their native beauty. But I wished I
could have collected the native plants and taken
them home, for I do not remember ever to have
seen a place in which they could be collected so
easily and with such almost certainty of success.
The lower parts of the hills, which alone I ex-
amined, are composed of debris formed from the
stones that have come down from the rocks above,
and are covered with and permeated throughout
by a rich humus, which is practically all decayed
leaf-mould. The stones are none of a large size,
and it is very easy to remove them ; with a little
help from the alpenstock they can one by one be
removed, and then the root, though often pene-
trating the humus to a great distance, remains
exposed, and the whole plant can be taken with-
out injury. And at Piora there is little fear of
the most greedy collector doing any real destruc-
tion ; he may help himself as largely as he likes
with a very clear conscience, and he will do little
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In My Vicarage Garden

harm for those who come after him. As an
instance of the ease of taking up difficult plants
there, I may say that the evening before I went
away I wished to find some seedlings of the
handsome Gentiana punctata which I had marked
by the lake side not far from the hotel, for I knew
that a full-grown G. punctata has a big root which
it is almost hopeless to attempt to dig up with
any chance of success. I soon found the plants,
and among them many little ones that seemed
exactly what I wanted. But I also found they
were no seedlings ; the little bunch of radical
leaves concealed a root stock more than an inch
in diameter, and it took several minutes of work
with the alpenstock to follow the root to the end,
and then it turned out to be nearly a yard in
length, with many ramifications, but the nature
of the soil allowed me to get all I wanted without
any injury to the roots. All collectors should
remember that it is of the first importance not to
bruise or break any of the roots ; if they are
bruised or broken, nature's first work is to heal
the wounds, and while so doing little other work
is done to the life of the plant ; and if they are
badly bruised and are long out of the ground and
so get dried, death is almost certain. Collectors
should also remember that it is labour in vain
with a great many plants to take them from
a soil of one marked character and transplant
them into another. All the plants at Piora
grow in the debris of primary rocks at a high
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Piora

elevation ; many of them, like the rhododendron,
will grow anywhere, but a very large number,
the majority perhaps, will simply die when re-
moved to a soil composed of lime or chalk at a
low elevation. I feel sure that the mountain air
is a great factor in the vigour and abundance of
Alpine plants, and in many instances in the
colour of the flowers, and cannot help thinking
also that the reduced atmospheric pressure which
the flowers get at high altitudes has its influence
upon their healthy growth.

I have, I think, said enough of the flowers of
Piora, but before leaving my account of its many
attractions I ought not to forget to mention the
very reasonable charges at the hotel ; the charge
en pension was eight francs a day.

In so small an hotel there is of course no
chaplain, and there is none nearer than Airolo ;
but I cannot altogether consider that a drawback
to the place ; I would far rather be a priest unto
myself on one of the beautiful hillsides than be
condemned to one of the dreary Puritanical
services in unworthy buildings which are so
common throughout Switzerland, and advertised
as " English Church services."

I have no doubt Piora is a very healthy place,
and would be a good place for a long stay, but I
fancy a little acclimatisation would be necessary
for some people before they got the full benefit.
I heard of several instances where the visitors
had not been quite well after the first day or two.
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In My Vicarage Garden

Perhaps the snow-water — the only drinking water
in the early part of the year — may partly account
for this ; but I am sure that a sudden change from
such an elevation as the valley of the Ticino to
the elevation of Piora does not suit everyone at
first. I went on the same day from Piora to
Lugano, walking to Airolo and by train to
Lugano. When I left Piora my aneroid marked
below 24 degrees ; when I got to Lugano it
marked above 28 degrees. This sudden altera-
tion is certainly rather trying to elderly people,
or to those not in full health ; to the growing and
strong it would make little or no difference ; but
I mention it because I think it would be wise for
some to take it into account.

I hope I have now proved that Piora is a place
of which many would be glad to know. I have
wished to show that it has many requisites for a
holiday resort in Switzerland. It is easy of access —
Cuivis contingat adire Pioratn — and when there the
visitor has quiet rest, with beautiful scenery, lovely
and easy walks, and an abundance of the choicest
flowers of the Alps. I will only add a few words
on a matter partially connected with my subject,
though not much. I am not a cyclist, but I can
scarcely imagine a more beautiful ride for a cyclist
than the road from Luzern or Weggis to Airolo.
The roads are throughout most excellent, the
gradients everywhere easy, and in most parts very
easy, though the ascents are great, and the scenery
throughout of the very finest description and vary-

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Piora

ing in every mile. If when the cyclist gets in
Airolo he is induced, by what I have said, to visit
Piora, he must, of course, leave bicycle at Airolo
and take to his legs ; but when he comes down
he may well go on a little further through the
valley of the Ticino. The valley is very beautiful
with the Ticino all the way ; about half-way down
he will be amongst the maize and vines, and at
the end he will find all he can wish for at Lugano
and its beautiful lake. But I must say nothing
more about this — my one subject is Piora.

205

CHAPTER XX

SHAKESPEARE AND ARCHITECTURE l

SHAKESPEARE was a wonderfully many-sided
man ; and many books have been written to
show his intimate knowledge of almost every
science or craft, a knowledge in some instances
so minute as to lead to the conclusion that he
must have passed his life, or a large part of it, in
that particular business or profession. A good
list, but not a complete one, of such books may
be found in Professor Bayne's masterly biography
of Shakespeare in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
But because he has written more or less on every
subject, and has shown his knowledge in almost
every art, science, and handicraft, we feel that
there must have been a good reason when he
entirely omits some subject on which we should
like to have had his opinion, and which we feel
sure must have passed under his notice. But

1 Some of my readers may see no connection between this chapter
and the foregoing chapters on flowers. There may not be much,
but I publish it, partly on the advice of others whose judgment
weighs much with me, and partly because to me flowers and
Shakespeare are closely united. I tried to show this in my little
book on the " Plant-Love of Shakespeare," and every day I feel
that the two are my very close companions and friends, and as such
I find it hard to say which I value most.
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Shakespeare and Architecture

there are such omissions, some of them very
noteworthy, and they help us to some small
extent to find out what he really was, by showing
us, though in very small measure, what he was
not.

Two of these omissions are very curious, and
have been often noticed. The first is that he is
almost silent upon dogs, except for their hunting
qualities, and in the few places in which a dog is
mentioned, it is in terms of contempt ; and of the
dog as the faithful companion of man there is no
mention at all. There is a well-known story,
originally told by Sir Henry Holland, and re-
peated by Miss Phipson in her Animal Lore of
Shakespeare's Time, that —

" Lord Nugent, the greatest Shakespearian scholar of his
day, declared that no passage was to be found in Shake-
speare commending, directly or indirectly, the moral
qualities of the dog. A bet of a guinea was made, which
Sir Henry, after a year's search, paid."

The other curious omission is tobacco. In
Shakespeare's time the use of tobacco was neces-
sarily much less than at present, but it was
perhaps more celebrated by writers of the day
on account of its recent introduction, and no
limits were placed to its medicinal powers. It
was almost considered a remedy for every evil
under the sun ; it was the herba sancta, herba
diva of the botanical and medical writers, the
" divine herb " of Spenser, and Gerard has two
pages full of its " vertues," ending with recom-
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In My Vicarage Garden

mending it to all " courteous gentlewomen." Yet
Shakespeare never mentions or in any way
alludes to it. He must have been well acquainted
with it ; no man in his day could have escaped
seeing it frequently, " and some cannot forbeare
it, no, not in the midst of their dinner," says
Gerard. And as a constant companion of Ben
Jonson, who was a great smoker, he must often
have taken his part in smoking parties, or at least
in parties where smoking was carried on. But he
has not a word, good or bad, to say about it ; and
Mr Stacy Marks tells us in his Pen and Pencil
Sketches that when he presented a cigar and
cigarette box to the Royal Academy he searched
in vain for a Shakespearian motto, and was at
last obliged to content himself with twisting to
his purpose Othello's passionate address to the
sleeping Desdemona : —

" O thou weed,
That art so lovely, fair, and smell'st so sweet."

But besides these two omissions, which are
well known and have been often noticed, there is
another which, as far as I know, has not been
noticed, but which seems to me very remarkable.
On the arts generally he has much to say, and
says it as one who had a warm appreciation for
art. In music, both vocal and instrumental, he
must have been a proficient ; his writings are full
of good allusions to music and musical terms well
applied ; they are, indeed, so full that I have
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Shakespeare and Architecture

often wondered that no book has yet been written
on " Shakespeare as a Musician " ; it might be
made a most interesting book, but it would have
to be written by one who was a master of the art,
and who knew much not only of modern music,
but of old English music. He also evidently had
some knowledge of painting ; not so much as of
music, but enough to show that good painting
had an attraction for him, and that he knew
something, though perhaps not much, of its
technicalities, and that he had seen good and
celebrated pictures. But while he can speak
well, and even learnedly, on music and painting,
he is almost silent on architecture of every
description ; here and there he is forced to say
something about a building, but the architecture,
however beautiful, seems to have had no attraction
for him. Either he did not care for it, or he
knew nothing about it ; or he had some special
reason for keeping silence on it. I think it worth
while to go into this remarkable omission more
minutely.

When we consider what the state of England
was in Shakespeare's time in respect of fine build-
ings, it would seem almost an impossibility that
any man who had a tithe of Shakespeare's powers
of observation could have passed through the land
and lived his life in it, and written largely on
almost every subject, and yet take no notice of
buildings which met his eye in every direction.
Yet so it is. Take the castles of England. We
o 209

In My Vicarage Garden

can have some faint idea of the abundance of
grand castles in every part of England at the
end of the sixteenth century from the few which
remain to us entire, and from the far larger number
which for us only exist as ruins. In Shakespeare's
day they were still standing in all their strength,
and in all their beauty ; but what can we learn of
them, or of the history of any of them, from his
writings ? Many castles are mentioned, and in
many of the plays the scenes are laid in castles
or their neighbourhood, and yet not one is described
in such a way that it could be distinguished from
others. He notices sometimes the surroundings of
a castle, and describes the scenery in which it
stands, but of the castle itself he says next to
nothing. For many years of his life he lived
within a very few miles of Warwick Castle, then,
as now, remarkable for its great strength, and,
from its unequalled position on the banks of the
Avon, one of the most beautiful of English castles ;
and in more than one of the plays the Earl of
Warwick plays an important part, yet he tells us
nothing of the castle. He probably had often
seen Berkeley Castle, and he could tell of the
" high wild hills and rough uneven ways " over
the Cotswold that led to it ; but he has nothing
to tell us of the castle itself except its natural
surroundings — " There stands the castle by yon
tuft of trees." He also knew Windsor Castle and
its surrounding forest, and he has laid many scenes
there ; but the only account that we get of the
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Shakespeare and Architecture

building is confined to the " several chairs of
order " with " each fair instalment, coat and
several crest with loyal blazon." We should not
expect him to give us any description of
Macbeth's Castle, though he had imagination
enough to do so had he so wished, but as with
Berkeley he picks out only its natural surround-
ings— " This castle hath a pleasant seat, and this
the—

guest of summer

The temple-haunting martlet does approve
By his loved masonry that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here."

The Tower of London must have been a familiar
object to him on his way to and from the Globe
Theatre, and many of his characters are made to
play their sad parts there, but of what it was like
he gives us no hint; it is "Julius Caesar's ill-
erected tower," and that is all. It is the same
with all the castles mentioned, and they are
many ; they are simply spots on which he may
place his scenes, and, great word-painter though
he was, there is nothing but the name to distinguish
one castle from another. It is the same with
dwelling-houses of all sorts. In his time England
had so far recovered from the Wars of the Roses
that it was getting well covered with grand houses
of all descriptions, no longer built as fortresses for
protection, but for comfort and beauty. During
his life many of the great mansions which we now
call Elizabethan were built, and he must have
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In My Vicarage Garden

known many of them, and all the Royal palaces
were being changed from dark fortresses to
splendid and comfortable homes. But of all this
great change we learn nothing from Shakespeare.
Palaces are mentioned, and manor-houses, but
merely mentioned ; and the only descriptions we
get are that one house was a " moated grange,"
and a clown talks foolishly of " bay windows
transparent as barricadoes, and the clearstores
towards the south north as lustrous as ebony " ;
and that is all.

The omission is still more marked in the case
of ecclesiastical buildings. We can form some
idea of the riches of England in ecclesiastical
buildings in Shakespeare's time from what we
still have either entire or in ruins. Every town of
importance was crowded with fine churches ; while
many of them had grand cathedrals and abbeys,
and in every parish there was at least one church,
many of them such as we now almost despair of
excelling, and all of them, if not so beautiful as
his own church at Stratford, yet showing some
architectural beauty which no Englishman could
altogether have overlooked. But in the England
of Shakespeare's plays these find no place. In
one place only is Westminster spoken of and as a
cathedral church. St Paul's magnificent cathedral,
as it then was, is merely spoken of as " Paul's," and
as a place of ill resort ; a few abbeys are men-
tioned, but only named ; and, though he must
have passed through Oxford often on his way

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Shakespeare and Architecture

between Warwickshire and London, its architec-
tural beauties had no charm for him ; it is simply
mentioned, with Ipswich, as one of the •* twins of
learning " raised by Wolsey, which " shall ever
speak of his virtue." In one place it would have
seemed that he must have spoken of the beauty
of ecclesiastical architecture, if it had any charm
for him ; but he passed it by. The messengers
sent to Delos in The Winters Taley when report-
ing the beauties of Delos, speak, according to
Shakespeare's custom, of "the climate delicate,
the air most sweet, fertile the isle," and they
report " the celestial habits, and the reverence of
the wearers," and the solemnity of the sacrifice ;
but all they report of the Temple is, " much
surpassing the common praise it bears."

And if he is silent about English cathedrals,
abbeys, and churches, he is equally silent about
the solemn services which were carried on in
them. He was a religious man, and certainly no
Puritan ; but there is little or nothing to show
that he had any respect for solemn religious
services, or that they formed any part of his life.
He makes it one of the marks of " gentleness " to
" have with holy bell been knolted to church ";
but it would not appear that he had often obeyed
the bell's summons, though we can never suppose
that he had got as low as Falstaff, and " have
forgotten what the inside of a church is made of";
and almost the only passage which shows any
acquaintance with Church services is the one
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In My Vicarage Garden

stanza in The Phoenix and the Turtle : " Let the
priest in surplus white " sing the requiem. Of
the clergy, too, he has very little good to say ;
all degrees, whether Cardinal, Bishops, priests, or
curates, were, according to him, either proud or
ignorant, or both ; the only exception being Friar
Francis in Much Ado About Nothing^ and Friar
Laurence in Romeo and Juliet ', who are represented
as good men and wise counsellors.

It is almost certain that Shakespeare was never
out of England ; and it is one of the common-
places of Shakespearian criticism that every
country in which the scenes are laid is still only
the England of his own time, and all the char-
acters, whatever foreign names they may bear,
are Englishmen and English women. Still, he
must have read much about foreign countries,
and must have conversed with many travellers,
and so must have read and heard of the beautiful
buildings in foreign countries ; yet he never
mentions them. Two entire plays are laid in
Venice, arid, more suo, he speaks of " that pleasant
country's earth," and he mentions the Rialto, but
of the grandeur of St Mark's or the Venetian
Palaces he says nothing. It is the same with all
the other foreign towns he names ; Milan, Vienna,
Verona (occupying two entire plays), Ephesus,
Sicily, Padua, Paris, Florence, etc., all celebrated
for their fine buildings ; but as far as we learn
anything of them from Shakespeare, they might
have been small English country villages of which
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Shakespeare and Architecture

little was known beyond their name. This comes
out still stronger if we compare him with the two
great English writers with whom he is so often
compared — Bacon and Milton. To his great
contemporary Bacon stately buildings and fine
architecture were a great delight; according to
him the study of them was a necessary part in
the education of every gentleman, and he has left
us the great essay On Building, an essay which
not only shows his practical knowledge in joining
stateliness and beauty with perfect comfort, but
also shows how the greatest intellect can deal
with what many would call only petty details.
Milton's case is still more striking. Puritan
though he was, fine and magnificent buildings
appealed strongly to his poetic taste. The build-
ings in heaven are all after the patterns of the
grandest buildings on earth, and he takes every
opportunity to show his knowledge and admira-
tion of fine architecture ; and it is a little curious
in connection with Shakespeare's omission of all
notice of architecture, that Milton's sonnet upon
him is entirely made up of building allusions,
" the labour of an age in piled stones," " a star-
pointing pyramid " and " marble sepulchre." And
so it is in Milton and not in Shakespeare that
we learn to love the beauties of " the studious
cloyster pale," "the high embowed roof —

With antick pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim, religious light "—

2I5

In My Vicarage Garden

and it is from the Puritan Milton, and not from
the no-Puritan Shakespeare that we catch the
beauties of the " pealing organ blowing —

To the full-voiced Quire below,

In service high and anthems clear," etc.

Something might be said also of the fact that
he makes no use of architects' or builders' tech-
nical terms. If he speaks of a " vaulted arch " it
is of the sky he is speaking ; and so of almost
every other word which might be considered to
be borrowed from the architect or builder. I say
this because it is from the seemingly unconscious
use of many terms peculiar to many arts and
sciences that the conclusion has been drawn that
he was not only a proficient in those arts and
sciences, but even a member of the special pro-
fessions and handicrafts ; but I omit this part of
the subject without going further into it.

It may, of course, be said that the entire omis-
sion of all reference to fine buildings and grand
architecture proves nothing as to Shakespeare's
ignorance of the art or want of observation of the
buildings. It is impossible to prove a negative,
and with many writers such omissions would not
be worth noticing. But with Shakespeare it is
different. There seems to have been almost
nothing that he did not notice, and having noticed
it he said something about it in his writings ; and
so when we find one particular subject entirely
unnoticed, and that a subject which more or less

216

Shakespeare and Architecture

came before him every day of his life, some ex-
planation does seem to be required. But can we
in any way explain this omission, or the other
omissions ? As to the dog, we may wish that he
had taken a more pleasant view of him, but it is
quite certain that it was not owing to want of
love for animals, or want of kindness. The man
who wrote much and lovingly of so many animals,
beasts, birds, fishes, and insects ; the man who
could say —

" The poor beetle that we tread upon
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies " —

must have had a tender heart for all animals. It
is probable that he had a physical antipathy to
the dog, just as others have to a cat or to
snakes : —

" Some men there are love not a gaping pig,
Some that are mad if they behold a cat."

And there we may leave it. His omission of
tobacco may be explained in almost the same
way. Some have suggested that the omission
was a compliment to the King. But Shake-
speare was not a man to allow his writings to be
shackled by any such overstrained courtesy, and
many as loyal to the King as he was spoke freely
of tobacco, and most of the plays and poems
were written before James came to the throne.
I should suppose that he was not a smoker, and
perhaps did not like it ; but he had many friends
217

In My Vicarage Garden

that were smokers, and so he would not say any-
thing about it ; he would leave it alone as " ower
good for banning and ower bad for blessing."
But we cannot so explain away his blindness, if
it was so, to all the beauties of English archi-
tecture. I am inclined to think that it must be
put down to that reticence on everything con-
nected with himself which has made it hopeless
for his biographers to make out the events of his
life from his writings. I can well fancy that he
had such an abhorrence of anything like puffing
or advertising himself that he would — it may
have been purposely or it may have been uncon-
sciously— abstain from saying many things which
might bear that construction. In that way he
would say nothing of the palaces or fine houses
to which he may have had access, lest it should
be put down to a boasting of his acquaintance
with the great men of the land ; and he may
have abstained from details of other great build-
ings lest it should be put down to a desire to
boast of his travels and his knowledge. That he
had in him this self-restraint and self-effacement
is no mere surmise ; it comes out in many ways ;
and it was a part of his character which many
other great minds have shown. A very similar in-
stance may be found in Bishop Butler, whose fame
rests on his two great works, the Analogy and
the Sermons, which will probably be among the
great possessions of the English language as long
as Shakespeare's works, but of whom very little
218

Shakespeare and Architecture

is known beyond his writings. Dean Church, in
his sermons on Pascal, etc., has a very striking
passage on this self-effacement of Bishop Butler ;
and has shown that, near as he is to our own day,
little or nothing can be learned of him in the
many places in which he passed his life —
Wantage, Oxford (Oriel), London (St Paul's and
the Rolls), Stanhope, Bristol, and Durham. So
it seems to have been with Shakespeare ; and
though his silence on all points of architecture
does not prove it by itself, yet, added to the other
proofs, I think it strengthens them ; and whatever
it may prove of his habits and character, or even if
it prove nothing, I think it at least noteworthy.

219

INDEX

ABELIA Chinensis, 31

Clematis, 33

Abutilon Vitifolium, 44

cirrhosa, 7

Acaenas, 68

Colchicum, 182

Aconite, winter, 4

Cole, 52

Alpenrose, 179, 198

Compositae, 126

Alpines, high, 61, 81

Cornus Mas, 49

Amaryllis, 44

Cotoneaster, 35

Arenaria, 70

Crinum Capense, 44

Arnica, 61, 81

Crocus, 6

Arundo donax, 25

Autumnal, 31

Asarum, 4

Cruciferae, 124

Asters, 29

Curtis, Bot. Mag., 74

Astrantia, 82

Cyclamen, 3, 50

Atragene, 63

Cypripedium, 63

Autumn colours, 34

Azara, 15

DAFFODILS, 12

Daphne, 49

BACON, i, 28,215

de Paas, Crispin, 5, 78

Bamboos, 25

Destruction of plants, 170

Bear and beaver, 162

Bedding out, 38

EARLE, Professor, 99, 105

Berkeley Castle, 210

Echium vulgare, 139

Birches, 16

Edelweiss, 184

Browne, Sir T., 142

Edinburgh, rock garden at, 85

Buddleia, 44

Elm, 1 66

Burton, 52

Elwanger, 90

Butler, Bp., 218

Entomological names, IOO

Buttercups, m

Epinal Glossary, 105

Butterfly, 164

Erica, 50

Evelyn, 6

CALIFORNIA Bay, 130

Campanula barbata, 82

FORSYTHIA, 15, 47

Medium I'*?

Fremontia 43

Portenshlageana, 68

Fuchsia, 44

Capparis, 44

Chester, rock garden at, 84

GARRYA elliptica, 49

Cheimonanthus, 7, 10, 48

Gentians, 180, 197

Chilian shrubs, 64

Geraniums, 101

Chrysanthemum Tchihatchewii,

Gerard, 75

68

Gilbert's Florist, 92

221

Index

Gotthard Pass, 189
Gramineae, 126

HELLEBORUS niger, 52
Hepatica, 53
Herniaria, 70
Hippophse, 33
Homer, 107
Horse chestnut, 166
Hutchinsia, 70

IRIS Stylosa, 1 1

KEW, 145

rock garden at, 87

Kohlreuteria, 17

LABIATAE, 124
Laurembergius, 5
Laurestinus, 8
Lilium auratum, 64
Linnaeus on scents, 114
Lithospermum, 185
Lonicera, 8, 48
Lucretius, no, 113, 130

MAW, monograph of crocus, 6
Medical plant-names, 103
Miller, Gardener's Dictionary, 74
Milton, 9, 116, 215

OPUNTIA, 44
Oxalis, wild, 17

PAEONY, 76

Paliurus, 22

Paradisia liliastrum, 199

Parkinson, 76, 96

Parottia, 49

Persimmon, 32

Photinia, 15, 48

Phygelius, 32

Physianthus, 44

Plagianthus, 43

Plantain, 26

Plymouth, rock garden at, 87

Portuguese gardens, 88

Primula farinosa, 198
Pulmonaria, 54

RANUNCULACEAE, 123
Rhododendron, 48
Rhus cotinus, 23
Rosa hemispherica, 20, 79

Mundi, 92

Versicolor, 91

Rosaceae, 125
Rudbeck, 73

SAG IN A, 67

Salisburia, 35

Saxifraga aizoides, 179

Scotch Fir, 167

Sempervivum arachnoideum,

180, 199

Sibthorp, Flora Graeca, 73
Signatures, 122
Sisymbrium irio, 136
Solanum anthropophagum, 144
Southsea, rock garden at, 83
Spenser, 65
Sycamore, 160

TENCRIUM latifolium, 44
Tulips, 13

ULEX nanus, 8, 34
Upas, 131
Urus, 162

VALERIAN, 137
Van Oosten, 14
Vere, Aubrey de, 51
Veronica, 70

WALL garden, 88

Water Lily, 171

Weeds, 26

Windsor Castle, 210

Wistaria, 22

Wolf, 163

Worthing, rock garden at, 83

Wotton, Sir H., 41

YUCCA, 44, 112

222

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