GARDEN PEACE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23686, 19 December 1938, Page 3

GARDEN PEACE

On the day a few weeks ago when all the talk was of war and its calamity seemed inevitable. I spent an hour with a countryman who had devoted the last 40 years of a very long life to the making of beautiful flowers and to their cultivation (writes Sir W Beach Thomas). Some of them have been named after him. and more will be. He has worked on scientific lines, of course, and owes a debt (though not in respect of perhaps his greatest success) to the law of Mendel, that old Austrian monk who made his discovery during times of tumult in the still tumultuous regions of Europe Perhaps both these men of science, certainly the one of whose Western garden 1 write were led to their achievements by a sheer love of the beauty of flowers The leaf of a copper beech, not only precious petals-, was held up to the light for me to regard its sunset hues. How at such a time could one help thinking of the war-battered Candide'c immortal maxim: "II faut cultiver notre jardin " ? If only that sentiment would prevail in the world!