And so, too, Andrew Marvell’s mower complains of the gardener that
“The pink grew then as double as his mind;
The nutriment did change the kind;
With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flowers themselves were taught to paint.”
He thinks it a wicked extravagance, as it certainly was, to sell a meadow for the sake of a tulip root, and he thinks it an absurdity, as it certainly was not, that we should have brought the “Marvel of Peru” over so many miles of ocean; but all this might be forgiven, but not the “forbidden mixtures” which grafting and hybridizing have brought about. Meanwhile, as we are now untroubled by such scruples, we may not only enjoy the results of the art of the skilful florist, but may even take an intelligent interest in the art itself. It lets us into many secrets of nature. It helps to explain problems of much higher significance than the brief existence of a garden flower. It makes us understand, in some small degree, how, in every form of life, a higher type may be produced from one of inferior order.
And the results are really wonderful. It is difficult to know what class of plants has in late years most profited by the artful nature, or unnatural art, of the skilful gardener; but certainly, some of the most striking successes have been among roses, clematis, begonias, and rhododendrons.
But it is not the florist only who has been helping on the cause of botanical science at home. Within the last few years the botanists, or rather perhaps the naturalists, have been increasingly busy among both the English field and garden flowers. The old botanists indeed had examined with every minuteness the structure and economy of the blossoms, had counted the stamens and the pistils, and known the origin of the swelling of the seed-vessel. And what Linnæus had systematized, Erasmus Darwin endeavoured to turn into a romance. Science was to be made popular in a long didactic poem, and The Loves of the Plants was the curious result. But to treat the various organs of a plant as if they were human beings and endowed with human passions, was obviously too far-fetched a conceit to give real pleasure, and it was not wonderful that Mathias, and many others, should have laughed at those, who
“In sweet tetrandrian monogynian strains
Pant for a pistil in botanic pains.”
And then the illustrators took the matter up, and in Thornton’s New Illustrations of the Sexual System of Linnæus, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful botanical works ever published, we have pictures of plants with Cupid aiming a shaft at them, and with a letterpress of love-verses. Into the new system introduced by Jussieu, and now generally adopted for purposes of classification, we need not enter. The Natural system, as it is called, which is certainly the sensible system, has now held its own for many years, though the more artificial system of Linnæus has still its use and votaries.