A NATION OF GARDENERS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 10, 28 August 1911, Page 6

A NATION OF GARDENERS.

At this season of the year, when spring is ;tt hand, tntd gardeners tiro enjoying the first daffodils, and thinking what the 'garden will he like in tiie summer, there is much interest for us in an article in the “Daily Mail" on the growth of gardening and of the love of flowers, in England. A good iniatv years ago we heard a Now Zealand University professor say that nothing had impressed him more during a visit to the Old Country than the growtli of this love of dowers since in’s young days. Were lie to visit England to-day lie would he still more impressed. The writer in the “Daily '■tail,” whose work takes him into many parts of England, says that “the gardens of England have never been so many and so glorious as now, and that Hood of living light and beauty which has garbed the whole length.and breadth of our land as for some high and joyous festival, surging from quiet rural haunts through all tiie suburbs, and even through the city gates, gives me pause for the refection that, whether or not at any time we might have been termed with justice a nation of shopkeepers, it would not ho true to-day to call the English a nation of gardeners.” He points not only to the gardens to hr soon on every side, and the pathetic pot-plants in tiie slum windows, hut the enormous output of literature on gardening, and the establishment of horticultural societies all over the country. The Royal Horticultural So cioty, the parent bod' , lias 12,000 fel lows, and the National Rose Society -5000, while the National Sweet Per. Society has 1000 mem hors, and over rhundred local societies affiliated to it. r i ho records of Kow Gardens provid' proof of the growth of interest ii bowers. In the ’eighties about a mil lion, people entered the gardens in the course of a year ; now the number is nearly three jnillinns. Everybody tries to grow flowers, talks about flowers, and wears flowers. The writer estimates that out of a crowd of 50,000 people who greeted the King tit a function this year, not 5()( were without some kind of flower The English “are moving in tiie mid;:of a great flood of blossoms tha spreads from coast to coast of out island.”