Part 4

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.

But there must be no artistic grouping, or representing of things as they should be rather than as they are. The work must be conscientious, as in the case of a great living sculptor who, having to carve an ivy plant upon a tablet, went himself to study the form of growing ivy, and found how entirely different it is from the conventional wreaths of the ordinary marble-mason.

There is one question in connection with English horticulture to which at first sight it does not seem quite easy to give a satisfactory answer. Are the flower-shows, the number of which is constantly increasing, an advantage or not? They certainly stimulate the production of magnificent fruit, of beautiful florist-flowers, and of handsome stove and greenhouse plants. But how do they affect the gardens in which these prize specimens are grown? It is mere matter of fact that, when a gardener begins to think of exhibiting, he is very apt to pay undue attention to the plants which will secure him prizes and reputation. If his master is satisfied with the usual monotony of garden-beds, why should the gardener give special attention to what can be of no service to himself? So he throws his whole strength into some bunches of grapes, some dozen roses, some trained chrysanthemums. And this is not the worst of it. The “dressing” of particular blooms has recently become an art, and little curling-irons are employed to get petals into their proper shape, and other various devices are used for various flowers. But there is after all a morality in these things. It is allowable to cut away superfluous petals, but it is not allowable to insert fragments of another blossom. This seems to be the limit. Now we confess the whole system seems to us thoroughly bad, and we recommend the managers of flower-shows to forbid “dressing” of every kind. If not exactly dishonest in itself, it leads on, and very easily, to the worst forms of dishonesty. But indeed, in almost every aspect, nothing can be more spoiling to the gardener than these flower-shows so constantly are. In the first place, the prize-ticket generally asserts that the prize is adjudged to “Mr.——, gardener to——.” The owner of the garden is nobody, and the gardener is everything. The prize is in almost every case regarded as the unchallenged property of the gardener, who has, nevertheless, won the prize by his master’s plant, reared at his master’s expense, and at the cost of time which has made him too frequently neglect much more important matters.

Is it any wonder if horticulture in its best sense—that is, the culture of the garden as a whole—is not what it should be? No gardener can get prizes for well-kept beds, for effects of harmonious colouring, for arrangement of shrubberies, for the grouping of herbaceous plants. He is tempted for the sake of a single specimen to sacrifice the beauty of a whole plant, or the clusters of an entire fruit-tree. That it is most important for nurserymen to be able to compare new species, or new varieties of old species, is of course undeniable. That our ordinary flower-show is for the ordinary spectator an extremely pretty sight is no less certain. But we are satisfied that in the majority of cases it is the wiser course for any one who really cares about his garden, and would rather have a succession of well-cultured flowers than some merely exceptional success, to discourage his gardener from exhibiting.

In conclusion, I can only repeat that “the English flower-garden” may afford far greater pleasure than it does at present. We must learn to look on plants, not as mere points of colour, but as old friends on whose coming we can rely, and who, returning with the recurring seasons, bring back with them pleasant memories of past years. And if, as often happens, they are plants consecrated by song or legend, the imagination is quickened as surely as the heart is stirred. We must remember, too, that our personal delight in a garden is entirely independent of its size or the perfection of its appliances. A child’s garden, such as Mary Howitt once described, a few pots of musk or mignonette on the window-ledge of a schoolboy’s study, will afford a pleasure which acres of garden, left only to the gardener’s care, can never give. “How _can_ I care for this garden? It is so much too large to care about”—a lady, who owns one of the famous gardens in the north of England, once said to me; and it was impossible not to appreciate the difficulty.

Indeed, as with everything else, the garden will soon grow dull, and the flowers lose their attraction, unless we take the management, partly at least, into our own hands, and be masters not in name but in reality. It is not necessary to understand every matter of detail, though our interest will strengthen as our practical knowledge grows; but at least we may make up our minds as to what we want to have done, and then take care that the gardener carries out our orders. We are too often the absolute slaves of our gardeners, and they in turn (of course I am not speaking of exceptions) are too often the slaves of an unintelligent routine. We have learnt, as Bacon said, “to _build stately_ sooner than to _garden finely_, as if gardening were the greater perfection.” It is really about time that we learnt the more difficult lesson.

NOTES.

NOTE I.

THE GARDENER BOWER-BIRD.

THIS curious bird was first described by Schlegel, and a coloured illustration of its garden and bower will be found in Gould’s _Birds of New Guinea_. The fullest account, however, seems to be that of Signor Beccari, which first appeared in a scientific periodical of Genoa. It was translated for the _Gardeners’ Chronicle_ of March 11, 1878, and I am permitted to make use of the very interesting narrative:

“The _Amblyornis inornata_—or, as I propose to name it, the Bird-gardener—is a Bird of Paradise of the dimensions of a turtle-dove. The specific name ‘inornata’ well suggests its very simple dress. It has none of the ornaments common to the members of its family, its feathers being of several shades of brown, and showing no sexual differences.

“It was shot some years ago by the hunters of Mynheer von Rosenberg. The first descriptions of its powers of building (the constructions were called ‘nests’) were given by the hunters of Mynheer Bruijn. They endeavoured to bring one of the nests to Ternate, but it was found impossible to do this, both by reason of its great size and the difficulty of transporting it.

“I have fortunately been able to examine these constructions at remote places where they are erected. On June 20, 1875, I left Andai for Hatam, on Mount Arfak. I had been forced to stay a day at Warmendi to give rest to my porters. At this time only five men were with me; some were suffering from fever, and the remaining porters declined to proceed. We had been on our way since early morning, and at one o’clock we intended to proceed to the village of Hatam, the end of our journey.

“We were on a projecting spur of Mount Arfak. The virgin forest was very beautiful. Scarcely a ray of sunshine penetrated the branches. The ground was almost destitute of vegetation. A little trackway proved that the inhabitants were at no great distance. A limpid fountain had evidently been frequented. I found here a new Balanophora, like a small orange or a small fungus. I was distracted by the songs and the screams of new birds, and every turn in the path showed me something new and surprising. I had just killed a small new marsupial (_Phascelogale dorsalis_, Pet, and Doria), that balanced itself on the stem of a great tree like a squirrel, and turning round, I suddenly stood before the most remarkable specimen of the industry of an animal. It was a hut or bower close to a small meadow enamelled with flowers. The whole was on a diminutive scale. I immediately recognised the famous nests described by the hunters of Bruijn. I did not suspect, however, then, that they had anything to do with the constructions of the Chlamydodeæ. After well observing the whole, I gave strict orders to my hunters not to destroy the little building. That, however, was an unnecessary caution, since the Papuans take great care never to disturb these nests or bowers, even if they are in their way. The birds had evidently enjoyed the greatest quiet until we happened, unfortunately for them, to come near them. We had reached the height of about 4,800 feet, and after half an hour’s walk we were at our journey’s end.”

THE NEST.

“I had now full employment in the preparation of my treasure, and I gave orders to my people not to shoot many of the birds. The nest I had seen first was the nearest one to my halting-place. One morning I took colours, brushes, pencils, and gun, and went to the spot. While I was there neither host nor hostess were at home. I could not wait for them. My hunters saw them entering and going out, when they watched their movements to shoot them. I could not ascertain whether this bower was occupied by one pair or by several pairs of birds, or whether the sexes were in equal or unequal numbers—whether the male alone was the builder, or whether the wife assisted in the construction. I believe, however, that such a nest lasts for several seasons.

“The Amblyornis selects a flat even place around the trunk of a small tree, that is as thick and as high as a walking-stick of middle size. It begins by constructing at the base of the tree a kind of a cone, chiefly of moss, of the size of a man’s hand. The trunk of the tree becomes the central pillar, and the whole building is supported by it. The height of the pillar is a little less than that of the whole of the hut, not quite reaching two feet. On the top of the central pillar twigs are then methodically placed in a radiating manner, resting on the ground, leaving an aperture for the entrance. Thus is obtained a conical and very regular hut. When the work is complete many other branches are placed transversely in various ways, to make the whole quite firm and impermeable. A circular gallery is left between the walls and the central cone. The whole is nearly three feet in diameter. All the stems used by the Amblyornis are the thin stems of an orchid (Dendrobium), an epiphyte forming large tufts on the mossy branches of great trees, easily bent like straw, and generally about twenty inches long. The stalks had the leaves, which are small and straight, still fresh and living on them; which leads me to conclude that this plant was selected by the bird to prevent rotting and mould in the building, since it keeps alive for a long time, as is so often the case with epiphytical Orchids.

“The refined sense of the bird is not satisfied with building a hut. It is wonderful to find that the bird has the same ideas as a man, that is to say, what pleases the one gratifies the other. The passion for flowers and gardens is a sign of good taste and refinement. I discovered that the inhabitants of Arfak, however, did not follow the example of the Amblyornis. Their houses are quite inaccessible from dirt.”

THE GARDEN.

“Now let me describe the garden of the Amblyornis. Before the cottage there is a meadow of moss. This is brought to the spot and kept free from grass, stones, or anything which would offend the eye. On this green turf, flowers and fruits of pretty colour are placed so as to form an elegant little garden.

“The greater part of the decoration is collected round the entrance to the nest, and it would appear that the husband offers there his daily gifts to his wife. The objects are very various, but always of vivid colour. There were some fruits of a Garcinia like a small-sized apple. Others were the fruits of Gardenias of a deep yellow colour in the interior. I saw also small rosy fruits, probably of a Scitaminaceous plant, and beautiful rosy flowers of a splendid new Vaccinium (_Agapetes Amblyorninis_). There were also fungi and mottled insects placed on the turf. As soon as the objects are faded they are moved to the back of the hut.

“The good taste of the Amblyornis is not only proved by the nice home it builds. It is a clever bird, called by the inhabitants Buruk Gurea—(master bird),—since it imitates the songs and screamings of numerous birds so well that it brought my hunters to despair, who were but too often misled by the bird. Another name of the bird is Tukan Robon, which means a gardener.”

NOTE II.

ARS TOPIARIA.