Women and Gardens

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18545, 3 November 1934, Page 10

Women and Gardens

“WOMEN and gardens have always boon associated. In the Garden of Eden, while Adorn naiUeu u>>. animals, 1 feel sure Eve named' the flowers.” writes .Mr. W. Lyon Phelps in Scribner’s Magazine. There is uo sight ino.ro beautiful that a beautiful woman in a beautiful garden —a lovely picture in a perfect frame. In Browning’s poem, “Garden Fancies,” we read: — Down this side of the gravel-walk She went while her robe’s odgo brushed the box And here she paused in her gracious j talk. ' To point me a moth on The milki white phlox. .. . But. do not detain me . now; for she lingers There, like, sunshine over the ground, And ever i see her soft white fingers Searching after the bud she found. Indeed, the poets have compared 'women to gardens. Thomas Campion said:— j There is a garden in her face j Where roses and white lilies blow. | For while women know more about, ■ flowers than most men will ever know, men have written the best poetry about both women and gardens. The , seventeenth-century poet, Andrew i Marvell, is remembered only for his “The Garden,” with its lines: I Society is all but, rude ! To this delicious solitude. . . . Annihilating all that’s made. To a green thought ia a green shade . -. iHere at the fountain’s, sliding foot, j Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root, •Casting the body’s vest, aside M,v soul into the boughs does glide; There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and combs its silver wings, And, till prepared for longer flight; Waves in its plumes the various light.

Just as I cannot remember learning to read, so women cannot, remember learning the names of flowers. They seem to have learned them instinctively. And us most houses mid linn buildings are designed by male arc,hiteds, m> most landscape-architects are designing women. A distinguished Boston scholar told rue that if no (lowers came up. in the spring, he would not notice their absence.

1 think men-novelists, when they use what 1 call the botanical opening (a very common beginning) either look up the flowers in a referencebook, or obtain the necessary tacts from their wives.