With heigh! the doxy o'er the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year."
The yellow Crocus seems to have been introduced into English gardens whilst Shakspere was writing his plays, and there was then, alas, no Gardeners' Chronicle to bring him the news. Gerard describes it as having "flowers of a most perfect shining yellow colour, seeming afar off to be a hot glowing coal of fire. That pleasant plant was sent unto me from Robinus, of Paris, that painful and most curious searcher of simples." What pictures are summoned before our minds' eyes even by the few words just quoted: "pleasant plant;" "sent unto me from Robinus of Paris;" "that painful and most curious searcher of simples." Each phrase shows a type of mind or a view of life.
The garden of my friend is a "pleasant" garden, and he, too, is a "curious searcher" of beautiful and pleasant plants. That is why his garden seems to be an old-fashioned garden, and not because it is at all like Shakspere's garden, or Mary Arden's garden, or the hideous Elizabethan gardens pictured in the "Hortus Floridus," published in 1614. His, though not by any means a Tottenham Court Road product, is no Wardour Street garden, but is old-fashioned in the sense that some of Heal's bedsteads are old-fashioned, or that beautiful English prose is old-fashioned as contrasted with the English of the yellow press.
He would not be without his Snowdrops, and quite as emphatically would he not be without his Crocuses. Great clumps everywhere, among the shrubs, at roots of trees and by the path-sides, radiate light and beauty like so many fairyland flashes. First come the violet cups of Crocus imperati, often before January has passed; then the brilliant array of yellow Crocus luteus (overwhelming the Snowdrops, by then well past their chief beauty and chief interest), followed by Crocuses of every shade of purple, lavender, and white. These, like the Snowdrops, are left quite undisturbed year after year, and if there be some little falling off in the size of the flowers, which is doubtful, there is more than compensation in the added beauty which the resulting gradation of colour and natural grouping yield. When I think of these glories, I can but reflect on how much beauty that academic "Shakspere-garden" goes lacking. Indeed, we shall all do well to steer clear of formulas and rigidity, as well in our lives as in our garden-beds.
[COTTAGE GARDENS]
The term "cottage garden" is an elastic one, and may be made to include all that big class of gardens where, in the words of the flower-show schedule, "no regular gardener is employed." But I think that most people, when they think of cottage gardens, picture to themselves those little wayside plots attached to the homes of working folks which cheer the passer-by nearly as much as they cheer their owners. One thinks of Rose and Clematis climbing over the doorway, of Sweet-Williams, Pæonies, Hollyhocks, Sunflowers and Pansies flowering in bed or border. Old-fashioned herbaceous plants are those which one associates with these cottage gardens, and nearly the year through one expects to find something of interest and of beauty.