CHAPTER XVII.

OLD FASHIONED FLOWERS.

“O, Father, Lord! The All-beneficent! I bless thy name, That thou hast mantled the green earth with flowers, Linking our hearts to nature! The old man’s eye Falls on the kindling blossoms, and his soul Remembers youth and love, and hopefully Turns unto Thee, who call’st earth’s buried germs From dust to splendor; as the mortal seed Shall, at thy summons, from the grave spring up, To put on glory, to be girt with power, And fill’d with immortality.”

“Common in old country gardens,” is the term we often hear applied to flowers that are a little old-fashioned; yet to many hearts they are very dear. Not all the boasted glories of Verbenas, Coleus, Achyranthus, and all the newer kinds of bedding-out plants can wean us from the flowers our grandmothers loved to cherish. Their colors, markings and veinings may be far surpassed by the flowers of the present day, yet loved hands once tended them; bright eyes grew brighter at the sight of them; and they are associated with all that is holy, pure, and of good report. Who does not like to remember the days of childhood, when the gathering of old-fashioned flowers in grandmother’s garden was one of the highest pleasures of life? Cowper says, that “it is a pity that a kitten should ever become a staid, old cat,” and there certainly are individuals who are tempted to wish that they had ever continued to be children. Do you remember the delicious fragrance of the white Lilac bushes that grew beside the door step, at the old farm house, and the handsful of Lilies of the Valley, that you used to gather under the old pear trees, beside the garden beds, where grew Sweet Rocket, Violets, Columbines, Spiderwort, Fleur de Luce, Daffodils, Sweet Williams, Gilliflowers, Larkspurs, Lychnis, and Nasturtiums, bright as butterflies? To be sure you do, and never will forget them while memory serves to furnish pictures for the mind’s eye to view. Perhaps you gathered them to adorn a fair sister, when she gave her hand to the lover whom all considered tried and true; or, with fast dropping, blinding tears, they were plucked to wither in the chilling embrace of the reaper, Death, who had gathered the fairest flower of the hearthstone--the dearly loved baby--the youngest of the home circle! All these associations, and hundreds of others, are linked to the “old-fashioned flowers” of the past; so let us make room for them in the garden, and cherish them fondly for the sake of those who once loved them so well.

I have a great fondness for the older annuals and hardy perennials, which are now too often despised and neglected; many of them are certainly more beautiful than those which are so much praised.

A well-pruned “Snowball,” in full bloom, is surely a thing of beauty! And I am certain that there are many discarded flowers which would amply repay cultivation.

The tendency of the age is to run after all that is rare and new, and to neglect that which every one possesses, forgetting the divine command to the chief of apostles, not to despise anything that God had made, nor to esteem it common. The first Dandelion possesses a great charm to me, is always gathered, and kept in water as long as a trace of its beauty remains. If it were a rare Japanese or Chinese novelty, how we should cherish it! but, no, it grows commonly by the road side, and in every pasture, so we pass it by.

There is no sweeter flower than the old, neglected Wall-flower, yet who cultivates it now? A recent writer says: “These old-fashioned flowers have a sweet fragrance which does not belong to modern favorites; and however much the last may delight us, they do not make us call to mind those delightful passages of our older poets that made our imaginations paint scenes of simple rural, floral beauty and loveliness that no artistic pencil can realize; but these ‘old ladies’ flowers,’ or ‘flowers of the poets,’ often unveil to us some lovely picture or scene that long since, in our earlier readings, we had painted in the chambers of our heart, and from which memory, thus assisted, removes a pile of rubbish that had well nigh buried it in oblivion.”

So we plead for the “flowers of the poets.” They are all of easy cultivation, requiring little care, and blooming in endless profusion and beauty, and possessing a charm and loveliness fully equal to those which their modern sisters lay claim to.

To be sure the Tiger Lily, which was supposed to be the

“Emblem of human pride that fades away, Of earthly joy that blooms but to decay,”

has been forced to feel the truth of the lines, and vacate its high estate for the more beauteous families imported from Japan; but the Hollyhock, of whom it was said,

“How high his haughty honor holds his head,”

has grown in elegance and gorgeousness of coloring, and has attained to the front rank among “florists’ flowers.” And the Aster and the Balsam have increased in beauty, and now take precedence of most other annuals; and the Gilliflower, like a real friend, attends us through all the vicissitudes and alterations of a century, even growing more beautiful. But the Marigold is almost superseded by its more brilliant sister, Tagetes signata pumila, which, in spite of its high-sounding name, is nothing but a single Marigold.

But if we read the seedsmen’s catalogues attentively, we shall find the seeds of all of these “old-fashioned flowers” advertised, and can supply ourselves with a goodly show of them.