A Year in a Lancashire Garden

Excerpt: ...of the country boy, is now far too much neglected. Its rich velvet clusters of twenty different shades make a bed of exquisite beauty. It is over too soon, but it can be supplanted (may I say?) by something else. In a second bed of Sweet Williams I placed Gladiolus bulbs, and now they are coming into flower from out the green cushion, from which we have cut the withered blossoms. A bed of the sweet little pink Pinks has of course been over some time, and though the bed is now quite bare of bloom-for I cannot disturb the roots-it is well worth sacrificing some colour in autumn for the three summer weeks of delicious perfume. Clusters of white Pinks have been no less sweet on the herbaceous borders, and now the Clove Carnations take their place. It is curious that so familiar a flower as the Pink 63 should be scarcely mentioned by the great poets. Shakspeare only just names it, and I do not think Marvell does. Milton, in his Lycidas, barely alludes to "the white Pink," and Cowley has no separate poem in its praise. Indeed, one may say generally that, with the exception of the Rose, the flowers in which the poets have rejoiced, and which they have immortalised, are the flowers of spring. Cowley, who wrote as a horticulturist, is the almost solitary exception. There is, however, a rather pretty and fanciful little song of Herrick's "To Carnations:"- "Stay while ye will, or goe; And leave no scent behind ye: Yet trust me, I shall know The place where I may find ye: Within my Lucia's cheek, Whose livery ye weare, Play ye at hide or seek, I'm sure to find ye there." For the ordinary bedding-out of ordinary gardens I have a real contempt. It is at once gaudy and monotonous. A garden is left bare for eight months in the year, that for the four hottest months there shall be a blaze of the hottest colour. The same combinations of the same flowers appear wherever you go. Calceolarias, Verbenas, and Zonal Pelargoniums, with a border of...