210. The florist may delight in this: the true lover of flowers never
will. He who has taken lessons from nature, who has observed the real
purpose and operation of flowers; how they flush forth from the
brightness of the earth's being, as the melody rises up from among the
moved strings of the instrument; how the wildness of their pale colors
passes over her, like the evidence of a various emotion; how the quick
fire of their life and their delight glows along the green banks, where
the dew falls the thickest, and the mists of incense pass slowly through
the twilight of the leaves, and the intertwined roots make the earth
tremble with strange joy at the feeling of their motion; he who has
watched this will never take away the beauty of their being to mix into
meretricious glare, or feed into an existence of disease. And the
flower-garden is as ugly in effect as it is unnatural in feeling: it
never will harmonize with anything, and if people will have it, should
be kept out of sight till they get into it.
211. But, in laying out the garden which is to assist the effect of the
building, we must observe, and exclusively use, the natural combinations
of flowers.[42] Now, as far as we are aware, bluish purple is the only
flower color which Nature ever uses in masses of distant effect; this,
however, she does in the case of most heathers, with the Rhododendron
ferrugineum, and, less extensively, with the colder color of the wood
hyacinth.
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