The N.Z. Mail PUBLISHED WEEKLY. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14. THE CULT OF THE GARDEN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1775, 14 March 1906, Page 41

The N.Z. Mail PUBLISHED WEEKLY. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14. THE CULT OF THE GARDEN.

The efforts being made by the Education Department ■ and Education Boards of this Colony to establish gardens in connection with the public schools are highly commendable, and are certainly assured of far-reaching results in the near future. The love of beauty in form and colour is fortunately native to humanity. Unfortunately the progress of civilisation has not always been marked by a continuous development of that love. The growth of cities has made it difficult if not impossible for many persons to have any access to the soil, or any opportunity of cultivating the germs of tastes implanted by the earlier and freer life of the race. The absence from thj curriculum of our schools of any study which made a direct appeal' to the aesthetic instincts of our children, was a serious blemish on an otherwise sound system of education. Art among civilised races has ever been accompanied by intellectual elevation. The joys that grow out of a love cf'the beautiful are the highest pleasures to which the human mind is susceptible. Love of trees and flowers preceded love of painting, sculpture, and architecture. From the shapes presented by Nature in its silent fashioning of plants observant men learnt some of the most beautiful designs which form the basis of art.stic decoration. The history of the highest civilisations the world has known has always been marked by something akin to a worship of the beautiful. Nowhere is natural charm displayed in guise more pleasing to humanity than in the floral products of field and wood and garden. Many of our cultivated flowers and trees and foliage plants are the result of long processes of selection by men who guided Nature along lines that led to the realisation of artistic ideals. But in every case the ideals first grew from observation of the beauties which unaided Nature provided. The garden rose as we know it to-day has thousands of forms and exemplars which for the most part ■ire the product of man’s selective agency. For pure and ideal beauty no one of these excels the simple flower of five petals which may be seen wherever sweet -briar or other wild roso bloonis. But the riot of colour of rose and geranium, and verbena and phlox, of dahlia ■and delphinium and gaillardia, though for the most part the ’product of man’s hands and brain is so only in the sense that he who unlocks the floodgate produces tho flow of -waters. The subtle alchemy of Nature is subject to human direction. He who allies himself with the Mother of all in brightening the face of this old earth is the best artist. Every man who has access to a foot of soil may be in degree an assistant in Nature’s workshop, an acolyte who “repeats his prayer and tells his heads” in the great minster of earth and sky. From devotion to the cult of the garden he may derive happiness given oaily to those whose hearts are one with the Infinite. A survey of the love of tree and flower among the nations of antiquity teaches us that everywhere such love was contemporaneous with tlio highest moral and intellectual development. In the cradle of civilisation poets sang the beauty of rose and lily and high waving palm, and even to the present day no higher praise can lover utter to his mistress’s charms than to compare her purity and beauty to those of Nature's floral handiwork. The world may again becopie Pagan, but as long as it retains its love for the beautiful it will, as the Greeks believe, also keep alive its equal adoration for the good and

the true. As the poet wrote, with a flash of inspiration that transcends all laboured reasoning, “He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small/'

and, though verbal dogma may die, the race retaining the faith “that every flower enjoys the air it breathes” can never lose the highest qualities cf humanity. Tire trend of modern civilisation is ever towards complexity, and industrialism, in as far as it involves the growth of factory and city, makes the love of Nature hard of exercise. But ever as individuals escape from the burden of personal exertion do we find an assured tendency to return to the higher ideals of life. The poet could sigh "O, for a lodge in gome vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade!”

And to-day the men and women who build country houses and tour the world in search of Nature’s wonders do but express in their own way tho revolt of aesthetic mankind against the drab commonplace of city life. For the worker in cities whose leisured days are far off or as yet impossible of realisation the lovo of flowers and trees and purling waters has in it much to lighten labour and brighten life. The crowding of humanity into cities makes the keeping f a garden a forbidden joy to all hut a few. Borne substitute for the cottage plot with its odorous wealth of daffodils and violets, mignonette and wallflowers, roses and stocks, is generally provided by municipal or government effort. But the public garden, with its formal beds and borders, and its warnings to keep off the grass, is but a poor thing in exchange for ■what the labourer has lost. Tho personal interest is not there. The trees and flowers are not less beautiful, but individual rights in them arc absent. One humble geranium grown by the artisan or his wife would be more to them than the most resplendent plot of pelargoniums in a public park. O'n the other hand to the man or woman who lias homo opportunities for floral culture the puhlio garden is a place of manifold attraction and interest. There are to be seen a greater variety of plants than most private dots can find space lor, and there may he gained an abundance of knowledge of method and selection, of ready application within one’s own private domain. For this reason, and because floral beauty is bright and refreshing and aesthetically elevating, public gardens are immeasurably good. Their beds and borders and winding paths and choice trees are the music of the public eye, but just as a hand performance is no substitute for the effort of the homo musical circle so the public park can never stand in national Art culture as anything more than an adjunct to the private garden of the citizen. It is perhaps too late to make any of our chief towns a city of gardens, but the education now being imparted in the public schools will in a little while raise a generation who can be trusted to take care that in the growth of future towns ample provision will be mado for the exercise of horticultural taste immediately about the homes of the people. In Dunedin and Christchurch for several years past the combined efforts of enlightened citizens have dono much towards the beautifying of tho pubdic spaces of thoSe cities and tho cultivation among tho people of humanity’s natural love of flowers. In Wellington wo have hitherto been backward in similar effort. What public spaces we have arc still much neglected, and for the most part the grounds attached to private houses are not conspicuous for beauty of tree or shrub or flower. It is true that our windy climate tells against success in the cultivation of many plants of delicate formation, but Wellington winds are not more boisterous or frequent than those of Christchurch, and a walk along the Avon is now an object lesson for those who plead natural difficulties. The golden gorse and broom of our hillsides, and the sweet, simple beauty of our silvery flowered manuka hold from us the reproach of inhabiting an entirely ugly city, and raising a generation to whom floral beauty is a foreign thing. Our Botanical Reserve, though not to be cited as an example cf the best that may be made of our opportunities, is far from being without attractions and educational merits. But in the main Wellington cannot- claim to be a city in which the cult of the garden has yet gained a place in the public mind. The exhibitions held during recent months by the Horticultural Society, while in their way affording abundant evidence of a love for flowers among a section of

the population, were but poorly supported by the general public. Nevertheless their effect was good, and when the minds cf the younger generation become awakened to tho possibilities of'individual effort, wo may certainly look to p, great increase in public interest in all that pertains to ornamental horticulture. Tho artistic adoration of flowers which characterises the Japanese people is tho product of many generations of culture, but it has not rendered them any less practical or industrious, while wo have every evidence that it has enhanced their national happiness anti elevated the level of popular taste. There is no reason why, in founding a nation of European ancestry, we should aspire to any lower aesthetid standard than an Asiatic nation. Our possibilities in Art culture are at least as great as theirs. For many reasons we are glad that our educational authorities are recognising the opportunities afforded by early instruction in the elements of an avocation which must help in tho development of a cultured people.