The English Flower Garden

Two hundred and fifty years have passed since this was written, and innumerable new varieties and species have since been introduced. To name no others, we have the annuals of California and the flowering shrubs of Japan, the heliotrope of Peru, the fuchsia of Chili, and the dahlia of Mexico. But the illustrated pages of Curtis, of Sweet, and of Loudon, will help us in our choice of flowers, whether annuals or herbaceous plants. It is impossible to do more than recall the names of some of the oldest favourites: and first among the flowers of the year is the Christmas rose. “I saw,” quaintly says old Sir Thomas Browne’s son, writing in 1664, “I saw black hellebore in flower which is white;” and certainly clusters of the large Christmas rose, especially when the slight protection of a bell-glass has been given to them, are hardly less beautiful than the Eucharis itself.8 Then come the snowdrops, which should be planted not only on the border, but on some bit of grass, where they may remain undisturbed till the leaves have died away. There is a delightful passage in Forbes Watson’s Flowers and Gardens (and Ruskin himself has hardly entered into the secret life of plants more sympathetically), in which, speaking of the first snowdrop of the year, he says:

“In this solitary coming forth, which is far more beautiful when we chance to see it thus amidst the melting snow rather than on the dark bare earth, the kind little flower, however it may gladden us, seems itself to wear an aspect almost of sorrow. Yet wait another day or two till the clouds have broken and its brave hope is accomplished, and the solitary one has become a troop, and all down the garden amongst the shrubs the little white bunches are dancing gaily in the breeze. Few flowers undergo such striking change of aspect, so mournful in its early drooping, so gladsome when full blown and dancing in the sunshine.”

The crocus comes next, the same crocus that once “brake like fire” at the feet of the three goddesses, whom poor Œnone saw on Ida. This should always be planted, not in thin lines, but in thick clusters, for only then can be seen the wonderful rich depths of colour, which open out to the sun. Tufts of crocus, too, should spring up beneath the branches of deciduous or weeping trees, where the grass is bare in early spring, and when once planted the crocus seems to go on for ever. A writer in the Gardeners’ Chronicle says that it is known that a particular patch of white crocus has been in the same spot for above 120 years. It is sometimes said that in course of time the yellow crocus will turn into the coarser and commoner purple crocus. This must be a mere fallacy, but it sometimes appears as if it were true. The fact, we take it, is that if the two varieties are placed together the stronger one will gradually get possession of the ground, and supplant the more delicate yellow, just as (as old Waterton used to say) the Hanoverian rats turned out the old brown rat of the country.

Other Spring flowers are far less cultivated in great gardens than in those of less pretension; but no flowers give more pleasure, both from their own beauty, and as being among the first flowers of the year. There are the auricula, or “Basier” (as it is called in Lancashire ballads), with its velvet petals and its powdered leaves; the double primrose, faint smelling of the spring; the hepatica, whose bright little blossoms sparkle like unset gems; the pulmonaria, with blossoms half blue, half red, and milk-stained leaves, for which sacred legends can alone account. Then, above all, are the daffodils, most loved of flowers by the poets, though, once again, in preference to any poet, as less known yet admirable in their way, I will quote a few words from Forbes Watson’s book. “The daffodil,” he says, “is a plant which affords a most beautiful contrast, a cool watery sheet of leaves, with bright warm flowers, yellow and orange, dancing over the leaves, like meteors over a marsh.” But we cannot, of course, pass in review all the flowers of the Spring, though we must urge a claim for such old-fashioned plants as Solomon’s seal with its palm-like leaves, and the crown-imperial with its circlet of orange-bells.

To beds of anemone, ranunculus, and tulips we have already referred, and we need not again recur to ordinary Spring bedding.

But of course there should always be a bank of violets, over which the soft winds will play, stealing and giving odour; and no less, of course, a bed of lilies of the valley – planted alone, so that their roots may spread to any distance – with their sweet white bells peering here and there from “their pavilion of tender green.”

The herbaceous borders of early summer become gayer still, though the individual plants are perhaps less interesting. We have now, with numberless others, the snowflake, the hairy red poppy, the valerian, mulleins of various sorts, the early gladiolus, the large flowering lupin, and above all, lilies. The variety of lilies, all beautiful, and nearly all easily grown, is quite remarkable, and we doubt whether (comparatively at least) any flower is more neglected.

Then come roses, and we would strongly recommend that, in addition to the newer “remontant” roses, the old roses and the old way of growing them should not be quite forgotten. Standard roses are all very well, but a rosebush covered over with blossom is very often much better. “Madame Rothschild” is pre-eminent in beauty, but (if she will tolerate the “odorous” comparison) the old cabbage rose or moss rose has a charm of scent and of association of which their fashionable rival is entirely devoid. The old pink china or monthly rose, which flowers on from early summer to latest autumn, deserves a bed to itself. It should be trained and pegged down, as is so constantly done in Belgium and Holland, and the blue lobelia should be planted in between. A bed of the yellow briar-rose is still more beautiful, but it lasts for weeks only instead of months. Other beautiful old summer roses are the maiden’s blush, the Portland rose, the rose unique, and the rose Celeste. But no rose, taking all the good qualities of a rose together, its hardiness, free blooming, beauty, and scent, will surpass the Gloire de Dijon, though the golden cups of Marshal Niel may be richer in colour, and the fragrance of La France recalls, as no other rose does, the luscious fragrance of Oriental otto of roses.

And now, instead of ordinary bedding-out, let me suggest some garden-beds which are far more effective. One is a bed of Lilium auratum, with heliotrope to fill up the spaces. Another is Agapanthus umbellatus, surrounded by Lobelia cardinalis. Then there should be beds of cannas, of gladiolus, of Clematis Jackmanni trained over withies, of zinnias, of the new hybrid begonias, and of asters. Somewhere room should be found for a border of everlastings, and somewhere for a row of the large red linum. One border may be given up to annuals, and it is no bad plan to mix the seeds of some twenty varieties, and let them grow up together as they will. The blue cornflower should have a piece of ground to itself, and so of course should the carnations. The white pinks will already have perfumed the herbaceous border with their aromatic scent, and the sweet-william and antirrhinum will also have claimed a place. The convolvulus major should have a chance of climbing upon a trellis, and the large nasturtium of trailing over a bank; and where the Tropæolum speciosum, which is one of the great ornaments of the gardens at Minto and elsewhere in Scotland, can be made to flourish in our English garden, it will be found as beautiful as either.

Above all, no garden should be without its hedge of sweet peas. If the pods are diligently pulled off, new flowers will be as constantly thrown out, and the “purfled scarf” of blossoms will remain in beauty till the first killing frost. It is easy to get a dozen different shades of colour, and nothing can look gayer, or give a more delicious scent. Keats – than whom no poet ever described flowers more accurately – speaks of the sweet pea’s “wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,” and of its “taper fingers catching at all things.”

Clumps of hollyhock, crusted over with bloom, should be planted near a sundial, or (as says the author of the well-known essay on “The Poetry of Gardening”), “in a long avenue, the double and the single, not too straitly tied, backed by a dark thick hedge of old-fashioned yew.”

Sunflowers, also in clumps, should stand out here and there, and though the modern sceptics may tell us that this American plant cannot be the Clytie of Grecian story, it amply vindicates its name by its large discs, surrounded by golden rays. Tritomas should hold up their scarlet maces to the sun, among tufts of the Arundo conspicua, or (better still, if possible) of Pampas grass. Lastly, we must not forget to plant, for the sake of their delicious scent, as the summer evening falls, the curious Schizopetalon, and the better known Mathiola, or night-scented stock.

But, besides its flowers, the garden is alive with other happy forms of life. The blackbird, as the Laureate tells us, will “warble, eat, and dwell” among the espaliers; and the thrush, as Mr. Browning reminds us, “sings each song twice over” from some blossoming pear-tree. Then the bees are busy all summer long, rifling for themselves the flowers, and setting for us the fruit. “The butterflies flutter from bush to bush, and open their wings to the warm sun,” and a peacock or red admiral, or better still, a humming-bird moth, is always a welcome guest. Only the other day I heard a delightful story (I wish I were satisfied that it was a fact) of a lady who got some chrysalises of butterflies from Italy and elsewhere, and, planting in a corner of her garden the herbs and flowers in which they most delighted, had hovering around, for many weeks of summer, these beautiful strange visitors from the south.

One great charm of a garden lies in the certainty that it will never be the same two years running. If we were only confident that each year was to be precisely like the last, it may fairly be doubted whether we could feel the same interest in our task. It is really no paradox to say, that it is fortunate that gardening should be always more or less of a struggle, for the very struggle, as should always happen, has the element of pleasure about it. Each year there will be success on one side, if something of failure on another. And there are always difficulties enough. There are difficulties arising from bad seasons, from climate, or from soil. There are weeds that worry, and seeds that fail. There are garden pests of every variety. The mice nibble away the tulip-bulbs: the canker gets into the rosebud, and the green fly infests the rose. Wire-worms destroy the roots of tender annuals, and slugs breakfast upon their sprouting leaves. Moles and birds and caterpillars have each and all their peculiar plans for vexing the gardener’s heart. Then again certain plants are attacked by special diseases of their own. The gladiolus turns yellow and comes to nothing, and a parasitic fungus destroys the hollyhock. And yet, if there were no difficulties to contend against, no forethought to be exercised, no ingenuity to be displayed, no enemies to conquer, it is surely impossible that we could feel the same pleasure and personal triumph in our success. Then, too, each year the intelligent gardener will arrange new combinations, grow new varieties of plants, and aim after a perfection which he can never hope to reach.

But the garden has no less also a scientific interest. Fresh species of plants are continually enriching our flower-beds, and botanists are constantly searching the wildest and most remote corners of the world on behalf of the English stove-house, conservatory, and garden. They endure untold hardships, and risk many dangers, if only they may secure some new treasure. Often they have caught deadly fever or met with fatal accidents in their search, and, true martyrs of science as they are, they pass away forgotten, except perchance when some unwonted designation of a plant may recall, not their memory indeed, but their name. But as one drops off, another will succeed; and so, among far coral islands of the Pacific, in the tropical recesses of a South American forest, in the heart of Asiatic mountains, or the unexplored mysteries of New Guinea, these lovers of nature are at work, labouring for our pleasure and instruction, and procuring for us new forms of vegetable life and beauty. And meanwhile science is working at home in another and a happier way. Not content with finding new species of plants, she is for ever developing fresh varieties. The art is no new one, and in old days the simpler minds of men were not quite sure of its propriety. It was unnatural, they used to say. It is in vain that Polixenes tells Perdita that there is an art that does mend nature, and, therefore, is nature. She evidently thinks it all sophistry, and not a gillyflower will she have.

“I’ll not putThe dibble in the earth to set one slip of them.”

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 strainsPant 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.

The most recent investigators into botanical science are not classifying plants, but they are examining into the meaning of their structure. The mere task of description and enumeration has been done, and so they have set themselves to find out why certain structures exist, and why certain habits (if we may use the word) have been formed. Why do the climbing plants climb at all? and why do some twine, and others cling? Why do the fly-catching plants cause the death of numbers of unlucky insects? Why are the stamens and pistils in plants of such various lengths and sizes? Why have some flowers a hairy fringe, and others drops of nectar in their calyces? What is the meaning of the scent of flowers, and what is the object of the night-opening flowers? The key to many of these questions is in the relationship of flowers to insects; and Charles Darwin, Sir John Lubbock, and others, have done very much to explore and then to popularize the subject. Much that is most important has thus been made known to us, but these eminent naturalists would be the first to own that there is much more still to do. The secrets of nature open out but slowly, and after long and patient wooing. It would sometimes appear too as if there might be danger, not indeed of adapting facts to theory, but of taking it too readily for granted that all facts must eventually fit into some favourite theory. This tendency may not be so apparent in the leaders as in their less cautious disciples in these scientific researches. From some of their expressions they would almost seem to imply that insects were made for the sake of fertilizing flowers. They attribute the bright colour and beauty of flowers not to the same good purpose that gives beauty elsewhere, but as if it were merely that insects may be attracted, and do their duty among the ripening pollen. They are contemptuous at the idea of a flower being intended for the selfish pleasure of man and not for its own purposes, and they point to plants of beauty that “blush unseen” where man cannot admire them, forgetting, however, that man has seen them, or he would not know of their existence. They will learn nothing of the affluence of nature, and nothing is quite accepted unless its use can be established, though on this principle it is hard to explain why, as Bishop Hall pointed out long ago, “there is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many a faire pearle laid up in the bosome of the sea, that never was seen, nor never shall be.”

It is curious how apparent extremes will meet. The very men who would most readily throw over the old theological argument of “design,” which believed that everything was done in the most perfect way for the most perfect ends, will now in the interests of evolution show the necessity for each curve of a flower-cup and for each marking on a petal. We cannot be too thankful to them, if only they will make their ground sure at every step; but it will not do to generalize too rapidly. For instance, it has been stated that veins on a flower are probably guides to lead insects down into the honey-cup below, and that night-blowing flowers are without them because at night they would be invisible and useless. Unfortunately, it has since been shown that the Œnothera taraxicifolia, and probably other night-flowers, are deeply marked with veins. Again, why in some cherry-blossoms is the pistil longer than the stamens, so that the fertilization must be effected differently to what it is in the more ordinary varieties, where the stamens and pistil are of equal length? Why have blossoms gradually developed properties to attract insects, when it is obvious that those properties were not originally required for the perpetuation of the species? Why should some flowers of magnificent size, like the magnolia, require scent to attract insects, if we must indeed admit that use and not pleasure is the end and aim of every attraction of the garden? And if scent is necessary in this case, why is it not so where the flower is small and insignificant? Why among roses has La France a delicious perfume, and Baroness Rothschild none?

But such questionings are inevitable as yet: meanwhile facts are accumulating, and the whole truth, thanks to the patient and laborious workers of our time, may one day be known.

But quite apart from scientific interests, a real old garden, unaltered and unspoiled, has a peculiar interest of its own. It is sure to be haunted by associations, and nothing calls up associations so quickly and certainly as a sudden scent of flowers coming and going upon the summer air. Time and change may have been busy since some long-absent member of the family has revisited his old home, but the flowers and their fragrance, still the same as ever, will call up all the past. There is the corner where the first violets were always found; there is the rosebush from which a flower may once have been gathered of which the poor faded petals still remain; there is the lavender, which supplied the oaken presses where the house-linen was always kept. And, apart from all such fond and foolish private memories, there are all the associations with which literature has consecrated the old garden-flowers. Pelargoniums, calceolarias, verbenas, and the rest of the new-comers have but few friends, but not an old flower but is “loaded with a thought,” as Emerson says of the asters on the slopes at Concord. Roses, lilies, violets, primroses, and daffodils, have been written about over and over again, and the words of great poets rise unbidden to the memory at sight of them. And then certain flowers will recall an entire scene, and Marguerite asks her fate from the large white daisy whose name she bears, or Corisande, in her garden of every perfume, gathers – but not for herself – her choicest rose.

While a garden owes so much to the poet’s pen, it is strange that it should owe comparatively little to the artist’s brush. Who can recall a single picture of gardens or of flowers that ever gave him any great amount of pleasure! Is Watteau an exception? But it is the figures in the foreground, not the garden, for which one really cares. And of flower-painters, there are Van Huysum and the Dutchmen, with their piles and masses of blossom, of large size, but generally of dull colour, and without light or warmth about them. Then there are our English flower-painters; with some the flowers are only subsidiary to the picture, and they seem to have adopted Gilpin’s advice that

“By a nice representation of such trifles, he [the painter] would be esteemed puerile and pedantic. Fern-leaves perhaps, or dock, if his piece be large, he might condescend to imitate; but if he wanted a few touches of red or blue or yellow, to enliven and enrich any particular spot on his foreground, instead of aiming at the exact representation of any natural plant, he will more judiciously give the tint he wants in a few random general touches of something like nature, and leave the spectator, if he please, to find out a resemblance. Botanical precision may please us in the flowerpieces of Van Huysum, but it would be paltry and affected in the landscapes of Claude or Salvator.”

But even when the flower or plant is something better than a “touch” of colour, there is often some gross carelessness, or ignorance, which gives a sense of annoyance rather than of pleasure. Each returning year, the Gardeners’ Chronicle reviews the Royal Academy from a botanical point of view, and nothing can be droller than the blunders it points out. Sometimes all sorts of flowers of various seasons are growing together, or a wood, through which a knight is riding, is adorned with agarics and fungi that belong to different periods of the year. Sometimes places, no less than times, are set at nought, as in an instance quoted by Mr. Rossetti from the Exhibition of 1868, where a Greek maiden is gathering blossoms from a pot of (American) azaleas. But, indeed, such instances are only too common. In how many modern classical pictures, for example, has not the large sunflower of America been introduced? But when the flower itself is one important part of the picture, how curiously unsatisfactory is too often the result! No one has tried more earnestly to set our painters right in these matters than Mr. Ruskin, and how little even now have they profited by his teaching! They catch hold of a suggestion, as when he once told them (showed them, we might say) that a spray of pink apple-blossom against a blue sky was beautiful, and the next exhibition or two abounded in blossoming apple-boughs: but they seem unable to grasp a principle. It was in 1851, in his tract on “Pre-Raphaelitism,” that he urged the painting of “the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they nestle in the clefts of the rocks;” and this last year, while speaking of the same artist, Mr. Hunt, he has had to repeat the same lesson, that plants that grow are pleasanter objects than flowers that are gathered. And, indeed, the reason is not far to seek. A bunch of garden-roses thrown carelessly down upon a mossy bank – and there is scarcely an exhibition without one – not only gives one a feeling of incongruity (as though the fashionable flowers were out at a picnic), but a stronger feeling still of coming death. We know those roses must wither and die, almost, we fancy, as we look upon them. No dew that falls can now keep them alive, as it will the humble moss – so much better than they – on which they rest. And it is almost worse when the poor gathered flowers are brought indoors and placed in some blue jar or Salviati vase, and the artist shows how carefully he can draw, not so much the petals of the flowers as the texture of the porcelain or the iridescence of the glass. It is difficult enough worthily to paint the light and glow of colour in any beautiful flower, but, if it is to be painted, let it be when the plant is still growing, and as it grows. Any garden will give subjects enough, if they are only sought for. Here is a bank of daffodils; here the white narcissus and the red anemone have formed a group; here a blue forget-me-not looks up into the bell of the snake’s-head fritillary; here is a great peony bowed down with its crimson globes; here a nasturtium trails its bright yellow blossoms along a bit of grey old rock; here a cluster of hollyhocks keep watch by a garden walk; here the purple clematis clings to the orchard hedge. Pictures of flowers such as these, if only the artist have some sense of colour and some refinement of taste, would give a real and almost a new pleasure to us all.