But as a “rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” every true flower-lover cherishes his wallflower, which returns to him so bountifully the slightest attention, which accepts the humblest position, which thrives on the scantiest fare, which is amongst the first to welcome us in the spring, and, with its scantier second bloom, amongst the last to bid adieu in the autumn, sometimes even striving to gladden us with its blossom year in and year out if winter’s cold be not too stark.
Old names give place to new, and in nurserymen’s catalogues we search in vain for its pleasant-sounding title, and fail to distinguish either its reproduction in black and white, or its designation under that of cheiranthus.
61. MINNA
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Lord Chief Justice of England.
Painted about 1886.
This, and the drawing of a “Summer Garden” ([Plate 64]), are taken almost from the same spot in Mrs. Allingham’s garden at Sandhills. Both are simple studies of flowers without any more elaborate effort at arrangement or composition than that which gives to each a purposed scheme of colour—a scheme, however, that is, with set purpose, hidden away, so that the flowers may look as if they grew, as they appear to do, by chance. The flowers, too, are old-fashioned inhabitants: pansies, sea-pinks, marigolds, sweetwilliams, snap-dragons, eschscholtzias, and flags, with a background of rose bushes; all of them (with the exception, perhaps, of the flag) flowers such as Spenser might have had in his eye when he penned the lines—
No daintie flowre or herbe that growes on grownd,
No arborett with painted blossomes drest
And smelling sweete, but there it might be fownd
To bud out faire, and throwe her sweete smels al arownd.
62. A KENTISH GARDEN
From the Drawing in the possession of the Artist.
Painted 1903.
This scene may well be compared with that of Tennyson’s garden at Aldworth, reproduced in [Plate 74], as it illustrates even more appositely than does that, the lines in “Roses on the Terrace” concerning the contrast between the pink of the flower and the blue of the distance. But here the interval between the colours is not the exaggerated fifty miles of the poem, but one insufficient to dim the shapes of the trees on the opposite side of the valley. Of all the gardens here illustrated none offers a greater wealth of colour than this Kentish garden, situated as it is with an aspect which makes it a veritable sun-trap.
