When o'er his head the withered Cherry-flowers
Come fluttering down."
And no man is so devoid of feeling as to be unmoved by the sight of the flowers associated with the ideals of the race—the flowers which Chaucer loved, and Shakspere.
I have seen a beautiful garden, containing none but flowers mentioned by Shakspere. This, however, was after all but a piece of pretty pedantry, and necessitated the absence of Foxgloves, Forget-me-Nots, Snowdrops, and other beautiful flowers. It is indeed strange that he, the greatest poet of gardens as of other things, never mentions these flowers, although they must have been well known to him. Speaking of the Snowdrop, Gerard, who was a contemporary of Shakspere, said: "These plants doe grow wilde in Italy, and the parts adjacent, notwithstanding our London gardens have taken possession of most of them many years past." This rather indicates that the Snowdrop then held a very different place in the gardener's heart, from the place which it since has won; and doubtless the same holds good of the other flowers which Shakspere left unmentioned. If Shakspere were writing now, using the names of flowers as he used them—"not to show his own knowledge," but because the particular flowers supplied the appropriate simile or key to sentiment—he could scarcely fail to mention the Foxgloves or Lady's Fingers, the sweet Forget-Me-Nots, and, more beautiful still, the chaste, unflinching Snowdrops. A flower takes time—generations even, it may be—really to eat its way into the heart of man; for it is not enough that it be merely beautiful or merely fragrant—attractive to our senses though these properties are—in order that we may really become incorporate with a flower. But it must, in addition, be full of association, and have been long watched and lovingly studied. There is one book, difficult now to obtain, containing a record of the truest appreciation and most careful study of flowers, and of the beauty of flowers, which we have in the language. That book is called "Flowers and Gardens," by Dr Forbes Watson, and the following passage from its pages beautifully explains the sentiment of the gardener who grows mainly old-fashioned flowers, or, at any rate, flowers with which he has been long familiar—
"We make the acquaintance of any individual existence under an immense number of different aspects, and it is the sum of all these aspects which constitutes that existence to us. A Snowdrop, for instance, is not to me merely such a figure as a painter might give me by copying the flower when placed so that its loveliness shall be best apparent, but a curious mental combination or selection from the figures which the flower may present when placed in every possible position, and in every aspect which it has worn from birth to grave, and coloured by all the associations which have chanced to cling around it. To the bodily eye which beholds it for the first time it might be of no consequence what lay within the petals, though even then the imagination would be whispering some solution of the secret; but to the eye of mind, when the flower has been often seen, that hidden green and yellow which is necessary to complete the harmony becomes distinctly visible—visible, that is, in that strange, indefinite way in which all things, however apparently incompatible, seem present and blended together when the imaginative faculty is at work. The common Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum) is a good illustration of the working of this principle. When I look at the beautiful silver-white of the inner surface of the petals, my mind is always dwelling upon and rejoicing in the fact that their outer side is green, though of that green outside I cannot see a hair's breadth. Again, we find the same principle at work in the feeling which compelled the old sculptors to finish the hidden side of the statue. They said, 'For the gods are everywhere.'"
There are people of whom we say (indeed, it is possibly true of everyone)—à bas the cynics—that the more intimately we know them, and the longer we know them, the more we see to love and admire. So it is with a really beautiful plant, and for this reason they who would obtain all the possible pleasure and beauty from their gardens should become, not gardeners only, but also botanists and students of poetry and of beautiful form.
In spite of Shakspere's omission, then, I advise everyone to grow many species of Snowdrops; indeed, for a week or two in February, my friend's sea-side garden seems to be all draped with their green leaves and serene green-white "drops," yet not one podgy, graceless double flower is there among them all. For he agrees with Forbes Watson that the "doubling" of beautiful flowers generally results in deformity and the destruction of all beauty and meaning. Double Roses, Pinks, and Carnations, he grows of course; for their fragrance, their history, and, in the case of Roses, their continuous bloom compensate to some extent for the loss of character in the petals, and for the "pen-wiper" appearance which has only too often been given to the individual flowers.
To return to the Shakspere garden, one finds that Shakspere's floral year practically began with the Daffodil.
"When Daffodils begin to peer,