Few people will deny the peace of mind a sheet of green grass can give, but few people, one imagines, trouble to think how they are preserved in large Towns and Cities. If it were not for Societies many little open spaces would years ago have been covered with streets of houses, many fair trees have fallen, none have been planted, and those growing have been neglected and allowed to die. Of the many Societies whose work has been to preserve for the Public pleasure grounds, good trees, parks, and flower gardens, not one deserves such praise as the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, whose great work has been carried on since 1882.
When one considers that in Hampstead over six hundred acres have been preserved by energetic Committees from the hands of builders it is easy to see how great is the debt of London to those who voluntarily work for this and other Open Space Societies.
It is not, however, by these large tracts of open country that the towns and cities alone benefit. Seats, fountains, flower beds, and pavements have been placed in old church-yards and disused burial-grounds opened for the benefit of the public. One has only to look at the map of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association to see how wonderful their work has been and still is.
To dwellers in Towns the sight of flowers in the streets is like a breath of the country. The long line of flower-sellers in the High Street, Kensington, one group of women in Piccadilly Circus, in Oxford Circus, in other spots where the place of their flower baskets brightens all the neighbourhood, are doctors, though they do not know it, of high degree. They bring the message of the changing year. They are a perpetual flower calendar, people to whom a reverence is due. One looks in Piccadilly Circus for the first Snowdrops, the little knots of their delicate white faces peering over the edge of the flower baskets. From the tops of omnibuses the first Violets are seen. Anemones have their turn, and Mimosa, and Cowslips, and Roses soon glow in the midst of the traffic, and elegant Carnations in their silver grass, and great piles of Asters. So we may read the year. All through the grey and desolate Winter these flower women hold their own, through cold and rain, and pale Winter sun they keep the day alive with the glowing colours of flowers. I often wonder, as I see them sit there so patiently, if they know the joy they give the passer-by, or if they are more like the rocks on whom flowers grow by nature. They are a curious race, these flower-women, untidy, with a screw of hair twisted up under a battered hat of black straw, with faded shawls wrapped round them, and the weapons of their craft arranged about them—jam jars of water, wire, bass, rows of little sticks on the end of which buttonholes are stuck. And they have wonderful contrivances for keeping their money, ancient purses rusty like many of themselves, in which greasy pennies and wet sixpences wallow in litters of dirty paper. I would not vouch for the truth of all they say, for it would appear from their words that every flower in their baskets is but just picked, or only that second from the market. And they regard such evidence as withered and wet flower stalks with half-humorous scorn. For all they may not be well favoured, and a pretty flower-woman is as rare as a dead donkey, still, for me, they have a certain dingy dignity, or rather a natural picturesque quality as of lichen on the pavements.
AZALEAS IN BLOOM, ROTTEN ROW.
These people are the town’s gardens of odd corners, while another tribe of them are perambulating gardens bringing sudden colour into the soberest of streets. There are those who carry enormous baskets on their heads, and cry in some incomprehensible tongue words intended to convey a message such as “All fresh.” To see a gorgeous glowing mass of Daffodils sway down the street borne triumphantly aloft like the litter of some Princess is one of those sights to repay many grey days. Then the brothers to this tribe are those who carry from street to street Ferns and Lilies on carts, drawn often by a patient ass. I own feeling a distrust for these men, they do not dispense their goods with much love. They are not eloquent, as are many flower women in praise of the beauties of the India plant, or the Shuttle-cock Ferns. I feel that they are interlopers in the business, and have failed at the hardware trade, or have no capacity for the selling of rush baskets, or the grinding of scissors. At the heels of all those who sell flowers in the streets are the out-cast members of the tribe, men with brutal faces who follow lonely women in unfrequented streets trying to thrust dead plants upon them, and cursing if they are not bought. And there are the aged crones who sit by the railings of little squares and hold out a tray of boot laces, matches, a few very suspicious-looking Apples, and, in the corner, a bunch of dead flowers—a kind of æsthetic appeal.
Your true flower-lover will search as carefully among their baskets for the object of his desire as will the collector the musty curiosity shops for prizes for his collection. There comes the time when the first Snowdrops, their stalks tied with wool, appear here and there and may be brought home as rare prizes. A word here of flower vases. Clear glass is the only form of vessel for any kind of flower. I feel certain of that. No crock, no form of pottery gives out greater the real value to your cut flowers. The stalks are part of the beauty of the flower, the submerged leaf as lovely as the leaf above. And, above and beyond all things, glass shows at once if your water is pure, and if your vase is full. Nowadays beautiful striped glass vases are made and sold so cheaply that there is no excuse for the old, and often ugly, pot vases so many people use. I own to a certain liking to seeing roses in old China bowls, but have a lurking suspicion that I am Philistine in this.
There is, of course, a distinction between Town Gardens and gardens in Towns. The one being the open free spaces dedicated to the pleasure of Duke and tramp alike: the other the hidden and hallowed spots where the town dweller fights soot, grime, smoke, and lack of sun, and fights them in many cases wonderfully well. One finds, though, that many people fancy that only Ivy, cats, and dustbins will flourish in the heart of a smoky City. This is not the case. Broom, Lilac, Trumpet Flower, Traveller’s Joy, many kinds of Honeysuckle, Passion Flower, Tulip Tree, many kinds of Cherry and Plum Trees bearing beautiful blossoms, Barberry, and Almond Trees—all these will grow well and strongly even in the worst parts of London. Five kinds of Honeysuckle will flourish; they are:
| Lonicera | Lepebouri |
| „ | Flexuosam |
| „ | Brachypoda aurea |
| „ | Serotinum |
| „ | Belgicum |