Garden of Mrs. Frank Robinson, Wakefield, Rhode Island.
Persistent efforts have been made to acclimate both Heather and Gorse in America. We have seen how Broom came uninvited and spread unasked on the Massachusetts coast; but Gorse and Heather have proved shy creatures. On the beautiful island of Naushon the carefully planted Gorse may be found spread in widely scattered spots and also on the near-by mainland, but it cannot be said to have thrived markedly. The Scotch Heather, too, has been frequently planted, and watched and pushed, but it is slow to become acclimated. It is not because the winters are too cold, for it is found in considerable amount in bitter Newfoundland; perhaps it prefers to live under a crown.
Modern authors have seldom given their names to gardens, not even Tennyson with his intimate and extended knowledge of garden flowers. A Mary Howitt Garden was planned, full of homely old blooms, such as she loves to name in her verse; but it would have slight significance save to its maker, since no one cares to read Mary Howitt nowadays. In that charming book, Sylvana's Letters to an Unknown Friend (which I know were written to me), the author, E. V. B., says, "The very ideal of a garden, and the only one I know, is found in Shelley's Sensitive Plant." With quick championing of a beloved poet, I at once thought of the radiant garden of flowers in Keats's heart and poems. Then I reread the Sensitive Plant in a spirit of utmost fairness and critical friendliness, and I am willing to yield the Shelley Garden to Sylvana, while I keep, for my own delight, my Keats garden of sunshine, color, and warmth.
That Keats had a profound knowledge and love of flowers is shown in his letters as well as his poems. Only a few months before his death, when stricken with and fighting a fatal disease, he wrote:—
"How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon me! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of my life."
Near the close of his Endymion he wrote:—