But the love of flowers is such a good thing that one must, one should not, begrudge any one of its manifestations; there is something beautiful even in the worst of them. The bunch of Violets is a natural and graceful gift, the birthday posy an offering the most fastidious will not refuse, the basket of flowers the sweetest present to the dèbutante or the diva. In a French town I once saw a skeleton parasol, trimmed with flowers, opened and handed to a lady-singer on the stage. I did not admire that, but the general applause was deafening, and it was impossible to repress a smile as the encore song was gravely given beneath its shelter.
There is room in our towns for both the lady decorator and the flower-girl; to both we cry a welcome!
CHAPTER XI
THE SMALL SUBURBAN GARDEN
“The size of a garden has very little to do with its merit,—it is the size of the heart and brain and the goodwill of the owner that will make his garden either delightful or dull.”—G. Jekyll.
The small Suburban Garden—it is time some one said a good word for it. What other place has been so much abused, maligned? It may, it does, in fact, go on improving with the march of time and the general up-waking of the gardening world; but the ill name sticks, and will most likely continue to do so till the cult of the motor-car drives everybody out of the towns to live in the suburbs. Yet, if the truth were known, for the last thirty years at least the little garden spaces that skirt our towns have, for the room they occupy, given more pleasure and done more good than the like area in any other part of the King’s dominions.
IN A SMALL SUBURBAN GARDEN
The suburbs of London are certainly looking up. Thanks partly to the motor-car, they are no longer the terra-incognita they used to be, for it is impossible for people to drive out in any direction without making acquaintance with them. Travelling by road in this way, one gets a much better idea of the capacities of the suburban garden than is possible from the windows of the railway-carriage. These, especially as we are just leaving London, show us only the pathetic garden of the flowerless kind, belonging mostly to the very poor; some with a stunted cabbage or two, other with a rabbit-hutch or a handful of dilapidated fowls, another with clothes hanging out to dry. Sometimes there will be a summer-house, but very seldom anybody sitting in it, nor does one often catch sight of children playing happily about; they prefer the more exciting street or the playground of their school.