I will not vex my bosom;
Enough if at the end of all
A little garden blossom.”
Courage is wanted to write a book about Town-gardening. Is there such a thing? Some would say “No; cats, fogs, and smuts forbid.” Yet how inseparable from London is the thought of flowers! Can we picture the West End on a summer’s day without them? The dust-laid, freshly sprinkled squares and streets, where behind half-drawn blinds there is the fragrance of many blossoms; the bright harness of horses jangling as they champ the bit, a knot of flowers at every bridle; flower-sellers with baskets at all convenient corners, and along the roadway carts of Palms and growing plants bending and waving in the wind; every man one meets has got his button-hole, and every maiden wears her posy; even the butcher-boy holds a bud between his thumb and finger, twirling it and smelling at it as he goes.
The love of flowers and an almost passionate delight in cultivating them has ever been a feature of English life, and of late years the old taste has been renewed and strengthened: no mere whim of fashion’s fancy is it, but the outcome of a nation’s feeling, deep and true; and what the English people love and long for, that they will have, despite all difficulties. Thus it comes about that London’s heart is gay with flowers. They strew our parks and open spaces, they fill the cheerful window-box and seed-sown area, and make the cold grey balcony to blossom as the rose; even where London’s traffic roars the loudest, one lights upon the pathetic back-yard garden, hemmed in by church and factory walls, the high-hung garden of the roof and parapet, the little beau-pot of the window-sill, the poetic window-plant, that shares its owner’s only living-room,—everywhere flowers, flowers, for rich and poor, especially for the rich.
“There’s never a delicate nursling of the year,
But our huge London hails it, and delights
To wear it on her heart or at her ear,
Her days to colour and make sweet her nights.”
Buying flowers is easy enough, it is the growing of them in big towns that is so difficult; but the struggle is not a hopeless one, there is much that may encourage. When we hear of what others have done, still more, when we have seen their successes for ourselves, despair gives way to animation and activity.