Our modern "florists" are wont to sneer at the lack of variety possessed by the old gardeners, but they must be curiously unfamiliar with the writings of such men as Gerard, Gilbert and Parkinson. To give but one or two examples, the last named writer, in his "Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris," gives a descriptive list of twelve distinct varieties of Fritillaries, eight varieties of Grape-Hyacinths, and no less than twenty-one varieties of Primroses and Cowslips, whilst of Lilies and of Roses the kinds described are even more numerous.
The greatest joy which a garden can yield is a feeling of restfulness and peace, a feeling which no garden of staring beds and ostentatious splendour can afford, but which is yielded—as by nothing else in the world—by a garden of happy, homely, old-fashioned flowers.
To most people, and more particularly to most women, one of the chief uses or functions of a garden is to provide flowers to be cut for the decoration of rooms. But I hold that a flower cut from its plant and placed in a vase is as a scalp on the walls of a wigwam—a trophy showing how one more beautiful plant has been defeated and victimised by its powerful and tasteless owner. The cut flower is no longer part of a manifestation of the will of nature; rather it is a slave—beautiful, it may be, but branded and soul-destroyed.
Regarded as decoration, I consider cut flowers in a house much as fashion now looks on shell ornaments, or picture-frames made of acorns, as things inappropriate and childish. Of course, in a town there is some excuse for them, for even cut flowers carry the mind to beautiful associated conditions; but cut flowers in the country seem ludicrously like lumber, just as bedsteads and toilet-services and cruet-stands placed in a garden would be lumber too.
The love of cut flowers is really but another manifestation of the spirit which hankers after "yews carved into dragons, pagodas, marmosets," and the other tree-monsters scoffed at by Rousseau, who added that he was convinced that "the time is at hand, when we shall no longer have in gardens anything that is found in the country; we shall tolerate neither plants nor shrubs; we shall only like porcelain flowers, baboons, arbour-work, sand of all colours, and fine vases full of nothing."
Indeed, there is in many quarters even now a growing desire for the kind of "new garden," which old William Lawson advocated: "Your Gardiner can frame your lesser wood to the shape of men armed in the field, ready to give battell: or swift running Greyhounds: or of well sented and true running Hounds, to chase the Deere, or hunt the Hare. This kinde of hunting shall not waste your corne, nor much your coyne. Mazes well framed a man's height, may perhaps make your friend wander in gathering of berries, till he cannot recover himselfe without your helpe."
Of course, the cutting of flowers is a long way from this; still it is difficult to see where a line can be drawn once the worship of "gardeners' gardens" has begun.
Through the open windows of house or cottage the eyes should be able to feast on the beauty of freely growing flowers quite as easily as if they were cut and stuck in glass or porcelain vase like so many heads of traitors on the city gates.
It has been said that all children are born scientists, but that only a small number of them ever pass on to the condition of artists; and it has always seemed to me that there is much truth in the statement. Children are ever putting the eternal "why?" to the great confusion of their parents, pastors, and masters; and it is the curious, the gigantic, the rare, which always calls forth their attention and admiration. Struwelpeter is more to a child than all the beauties of a Charles Robinson, and to few men or women is it given to derive as much pleasure from beauty as from that which is usually called "interesting." Hence, the ordinary criticisms of gardens; hence, also, the usual aims of gardeners. So many people desire the gaudy, or the unique, or the curious, that we are apt to look upon gardens merely as appliances for the production of quaint or monstrous flowers.