"This flower" (it was the Yucca Filamentosa) "was made for the moon as the Heliotrope is for the sun, and refuses other influences, or to display her beauty in any other light. Many white flowers are far more beautiful by day. The lily, for instance, with its firm thick leaf, needs the broadest light to manifest its purity, but these transparent leaves of greenish white, which look dull in the day, are melted by the moon to glistening silver...." The second evening I went out into the garden again. In clearest moonlight stood my flower, more beautiful than ever. The stalk pierced the air like a spear; all the little bells had erected themselves around it in most graceful array, with petals more transparent than silver, and of softer light than the diamond. Their edges were clearly but not sharply defined—they seemed to have been made by the moon's rays. The leaves, which had looked ragged by day, now seemed fringed by most delicate gossamer, and the plant might claim, with pride, its distinctive epithet of filamentosa.
On another grass-plot near I have one of the beautiful Retinosporas of Japan, which was one day planted for me by a friend. He is the poet, who says that—
"Eastward roll the orbs of heaven,
Westward tend the thoughts of men:
Let the Poet, nature-driven,
Wander Eastward now and then:—"
and this tree, while it lives, will remind me of the East, and of him who wrote these lines.
But there are other pleasant ways of recalling one's friends to memory.
I never stay anywhere, where there is a garden, without bringing back with me some one or more shrubs, as a remembrance of a beautiful place or happy hours; and, when I plant them, I fasten to them a label, mentioning their old home, and thus I am reminded—now of a quaint low house covered with creepers and nestling among the hills of Wales—now of a magnificent castle with its pleasance in the north of Ireland,—now of a great hall in Scotland, where a wild glen runs down past the garden to the woods,—now of an old English abbey, where the flowers of to-day spring up among the ruins of a thousand years ago.
Among the flowers in the inner garden, which have well repaid me during the last year or two, have been the Anemones—delightful old flowers—"pied wind-flowers," Shelley calls them,—which first sprang to birth when Venus wept Adonis. Then I have had two successful beds of Ranunculus; one was prettily and fancifully mottled; the other was of the finest scarlet,—a scarlet so intense that it seemed to be almost black in the inner shadows of the petals. A gifted American lady once said to me—"Does not black seem to underlie all bright scarlet?" and I have thought of this as I have looked at this bed of Ranunculus, and I think of it often as I see the red coats of our soldiers passing by. I have often noticed, too, that, in an evening, when there is still light enough to see flowers, that are yellow, or blue, or pink, the blossoms of a scarlet Pelargonium give forth no colour, but look as if cut out of some soft black velvet. Another spring bed, from which I had hoped much, has disappointed me. It was a bed of Crown Imperials, but for some reason they flowered irregularly and produced no effect. But the individual flowers of some were magnificent. I had never examined a Crown Imperial properly before, and never knew that its great beauty lay in the little circlet of pearls—nectaries, I suppose they are—which lie at the bottom of each orange bell. They are quite exquisite in their grey and white glittering movement, as the light plays upon them, and are more like pearls than anything else in nature.
Among my humbler flowers, of which I have somehow made no mention, is the Pansy, yet few flowers have more associations connected with them. The Pansy—the Heartsease we still sometimes call it—is Shakespeare's "Love in Idleness," and Milton's "Pansy freak'd with jet." The American poet, Edgar Poe, speaks of the "beautiful Puritan Pansies;" and I remember a fine wild passage in one of this same poet's little-known essays, where two angels are talking, and one of them says—"We will swoop outward into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where for Pansies, and Violets, and Heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns."
Last year my finest bed was one of the Canna Indica, in which every plant threw up grand broad leaves and spikes of crimson or yellow blossom. Why is not the Canna far more common in all our gardens? At present one sees it in public parks, or where gardening on a great scale is carried on, but in smaller gardens it is very rare, and yet it is easy enough to grow; and once I think it must have been more known than it is at present. Gerarde speaks of it as "the flowering reed," and gives a very fair illustration of it. He adds, however, "Myself have planted it in my garden divers times, but it never came to flowering or seeding, for that it is very impatient to endure the injury of our cold climate." Cowley, too, speaks of the "lustre of the Indian flowering reed;" and Dr. Darwin, in his Loves of the Plants, gives it (with its single pistil and stamen), as the best type of the conjugal fidelity of flowers, and tells how—
"The tall Canna lifts his curlèd brow,
Erect to heaven;"