It has been observed that the love of gardens is the only passion which increases with age.  It is generally the most indulged in the two extremes of life.  In middle age men are often too much involved in the affairs of the busy world fully to appreciate the tranquil pleasures in the gift of Flora.  Flowers are the toys of the young and a source of the sweetest and serenest enjoyments for the old.  But there is no season of life for which they are unfitted and of which they cannot increase the charm.

“Give me,” says the poet Rogers, “a garden well kept, however small, two or three spreading trees and a mind at ease, and I defy the world.”  The poet adds that he would not have his garden, too much extended.  He seems to think it possible to have too much of a good thing.  “Three acres of flowers and a regiment of gardeners,” he says, “bring no more pleasure than a sufficiency.”  “A hundred thousand roses,” he adds, “which we look at en masse, do not identify themselves in the same manner as even a very small border; and hence, if the cottager’s mind is properly attuned, the little cottage-garden may give him more real delight than belongs to the owner of a thousand acres.”  In a smaller garden “we become acquainted, as it were,” says the same poet, “and even form friendships with, individual flowers.”  It is delightful to observe how nature thus adjusts the inequalities of fortune and puts the poor man, in point of innocent happiness, on a level with the rich.  The man of the most moderate means may cultivate many elegant tastes, and may have flowers in his little garden that the greatest sovereign in the world might enthusiastically admire.  Flowers are never vulgar.  A rose from a peasant’s patch of ground is as fresh and elegant and fragrant as if it had been nurtured in a Royal parterre, and it would not be out of place in the richest porcelain vase of the most aristocratical drawing-room in Europe.  The poor man’s flower is a present for a princess, and of all gifts it is the one least liable to be rejected even by the haughty.  It might he worn on the fair brow or bosom of Queen Victoria with a nobler grace than the costliest or most elaborate production of the goldsmith or the milliner.

The majority of mankind, in the most active spheres of life, have moments in which they sigh for rural retirement, and seldom dream of such a retreat without making a garden the leading charm of it.  Sir Henry Wotton says that Lord Bacon’s garden was one of the best that he had seen either at home or abroad.  Evelyn, the author of “Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees,” dwells with fond admiration, and a pleasing egotism, on the charms of his own beautiful and highly cultivated estate at Wooton in the county of Surrey.  He tells us that the house is large and ancient and is “sweetly environed with delicious streams and venerable woods.”  “I will say nothing,” he continues, “of the air, because the pre-eminence is universally given