going out to her garden, on an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her rake over her shoulder to her garden of labours. A woman in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle in form and manners would sow and plant and rake incessantly."

Good huswives provide, ere an sickness do come, Of sundrie good things in house to have some: Good aqua composita, vinegar tart,

Rose water and treacle to comfort the heart, Good herbes in the garden for agues that burn, That over strong heat to good temper turn.

Thomas Tusser.

My garden was a plain vineyard when it came into my hands not two years ago, and it is with a small expense, turned into a garden that (apart from the advantages of the climate) I like better than that of Kensington. The Italian vineyards are not planted like those in France, but in clumps, fastened to trees planted in equal ranks (commonly fruit trees), and continued in festoons from one to the other, which I have turned into covered galleries of shade, that I can walk in the heat without being incommoded by it.

I have made a dining-room of verdure, capable of holding a table of twenty covers; the whole ground is 317 feet in length, and 200 in breadth. You see it is far from large; but so prettily disposed (though I say it) that I never saw a more agreeable rustic garden, abounding with all sorts of fruit, and producing a variety of wines.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

(A Letter, dated Louvere, July 10th, 1753.)

Any book I see advertised that treats of Gardens

I immediately buy.

"The Solitary Summer."

(Countess von Arnim.)

Flowers and Books

Books Versus Gardens

Bookes (Courteous Reader) may rightly be compared to Gardens; Wherein, let the painfull Gardiner expresse never so much care and diligent endeavor; yet among the very fairest, sweetest and freshest Flowers, as also Plants of most precious Vertue; ill savouring and stinking weeds, fit for no use but the fire or mucke-hill, will spring and sprout up. So fareth it with Bookes of the very best quality; let the Author bee never so indulgent, and the Printer vigilant; yet both may misse their ayme, by the escape of Errors and Mistakes, either in sense or matter, the one fault by a ragged Written Copy; and the other through want of wary Correction.

Giovanni Boccaccio.

1 write in a nook that I call my boudoir; it is a summer-house not bigger than a sedan-chair; the door of it opens into the garden that is now crowded with pinks, roses and honeysuckles, and the window into my neighbour's orchard. It formerly served an apothecary as a smoking-room; at present, however, it is dedicated to sublimer uses.

William Cowper.

A Garden of Books

Where may one indulge in day-dreams, if not in a Garden! In the very centre of the garden, away from house or cottage, but united to it by a pleached alley or pergola of vines or roses, an octagonal book-tower like Montaigne's rises upon arches forming an arbour of scented shade. Between the book-shelves, windows at every angle," as in Pliny's Villa library, opening upon a broad gallery supported by pillars of "faire carpenter's work,

round which cluster flowering creepers, follow the course of the sun in its play upon the landscape. "Last stage of all," a glass dome gives gaze upon the stars by night and the clouds by day.

***

And in this Garden of Books-sui et amicorum, would pass the coloured days and the white nights, "not in quite blank forgetfulness, but in continuous dreaming, only half-veiled by sleep."

Albert Forbes Sieveking.

I like a writer who is original enough to water his garden with quotations, without fear of being drowned out.

Flower-Names

Henry van Dyke.

What's in a Name?

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare.

The flower-names are often little poems in themselves. Those long uncouth names, dreaded in botany, hide Nature-meanings in them. Heliotrope is "she who turns to the sun;" *** Nasturtium carries its meaning of "bent-nose" in its face; Geranium is "crane's-bill,"—let the seed-vessel grow and it will tell the reason why; Saxifrage is "rockcleaver," named so from its birthplace in the clefts; Anemone is "wind-flower." These, you see, were but simple heart and eye names to the Greeks or Romans, just as we call the pets heart's-ease, day's eye, morning-glory, honeysuckle, mignonette. Each people has its own. Other flower-names come down to us impearled with myth and story,-the hyacinth, narcissus, Solomon's seal, arethusa, the passion flower.

William C. Gannett.

"The Frenchman's Darling":

It was Cowper who gave this now common name to the Mignonette.

Forget-Me-Not

When to the flowers-so beautiful

The Father gave a name,

Back came a little blue-eyed one

(All timidly it came)

And standing at its Father's feet,
And gazing in His face-

It said in low and trembling tones,
With sweet and gentle grace,
"Dear God, the name thou gavest me
Alas! I have forgot."

Then kindly looked the Father down,

And said, "Forget-me-not." Unknown.

We may fancy that Eve-herself the first rose of womanhood-gave its name among the roses of Eden, and we like to think that as Adam gave names to all cattle, Eve tried her syllables upon the flowers. Her joy in existence and love must have blossomed easily into words, as she emphasized one after another of them,-was it love or praise, speech half asleep, or song half awake?

Candace Wheeler.

The Poet's Garden

The chief use of flowers is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

Selected.

There is probably no famous poet that has not sealed his fame into a song about some favorite of the fields. Wordsworth's celandines and daffodils are noted, and Burns's daisy, and Herbert's rose, and

་་་་་་་་.

Emerson's rhodora, and Lowell's dandelion; while in Chaucer the whole Spring buds and sings, and all along the lines of Tennyson flowers brush you with fine touches.

William C. Gannett.

Flowers will bloom over and over again in poems, as in the summer fields, to the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the Spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars? Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Who ever sees a hawthorn or a sweetbrier (the eglantine) that his thoughts do not, like a bolt of light, burst through ranks of poets, and ranges of sparkling conceits which have been born since England had a written language, and of which the rose, the willow, the eglantine, the hawthorn, and other scores of vines or trees, have been the cause as they are now and forevermore the suggestions and remembrances? Who ever looks upon an oak and does not think of navies, of storms, of battles on the ocean, of the noble lyrics of the sea, of English glades, of the fugitive Charles, the tree-mounted monarch, of the Herne oak, of parks, and forests of Robin Hood and his merry men, of old baronial halls with mellow light streaming through diamond-shaped panes upon oaken floors, and of carved oaken wainscotings?

Selected.