FRAGRANCE IN THE NATIJRAL ORDERS •07 we begin to approach the subject of scented flowers. Incidentally she mentions some 60 source-books, while twice this number appears in her "A Garden of Herbs" (1922), a different and more detailed listing. To-day, as there is so much latent perfume potential among the flowering plants, shrubs and trees in our parks and gardens, it is opportune to touch very lightly upon the status of gardens. "God Almighty first planted a garden" is the prelude of Francis Bacon's famous essay, "Of Gardens," but to view gardens in a proper perspective it is timely to quote from the introductory remarks in Geoffrey Taylor's "The Victorian Flower Gardens," published as recently as 1952, and thereby add to our knowledge of the magnitude of this sector, for he mentions upwards of 130 source-books. The author comments upon English gardening as being as old as the Roman occupation, yet these pre-historic, Fre-Victorian gardens were not the sort that first come to mind when the word is heard in this mid-twentieth century. When we speak of "the garden," we mean pre-eminently the flower garden, and it was in the Victorian Age, and no earlier, that the flower garden reached its pre-eminence. It should, however, be noted that it was in the 17th century, with the wealth and consequence that resulted from the discovery of America, that gardening took a step forward. Elizabethan and Jacobean gardens for the most part were formal, italianate, architecturally elegant and horticulturMly dull. Charles I was a considerable enthusiast, and one, John Tradescant, whom he employed, was the founder of that great tradition, that long line of pro- fessional gardeners, that has come down to our own day. It was Tradescant who really began the systematic introduction of foreign plants for the garden, he travelled as far as Russia, published a long account of Mediter- ranean plar•ts which he thought would do well in this country, he introduced the Algerian apricot, and in 1620 established the first of the English "Physic Gardens," at South Lambeth. Tradescant's son--as great a gardener as his father, travelled extensively and collected many herbaceous plants, shrubs and trees from North America and the genus of spider-worts, known as the Tradescanthia were named after him. So far we have only come across the western spread of the wild plants which were cultivated for their culinary, medicinal and perhaps quasi- magical properties, and we should particularly note that it was the aromatic foliage, and not the insignificant flowers, which rendered them useful. The Coming of the Flowers is the title of a book published in 1952 (referred to later), but it is of particular interest to interpolate a paragraph from Maurice Maeterlinck's Old-fashioned Flowers (1906). "Old-fashioned flowers," I said, "I was wrong for they are not so old--the tulip came from Con- stantinople in the 16th century, the balsam, fuchsia, African marigold,

208 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS rose-campion, variegated aconite, hollyhock and campanula, all arrived about the same time from the Indies, Mexico, Persia, Syria and Italy," and so on for many pages, but at the conclusion of this section he poses the query. "Have you ever observed the poverty and monotony, most skilfully disguised, of the floral-decoration of the finest of our old manuscripts ? Again, the pictures in our museums, down to the end of the Renaissance, have only five or six types of flowers, incessantly repeated. "Before the 16th century, gardens were almost bare and later could have shown us only what the poorest village shows to-day. The violet, the daisy, lily of the valley, marigolds, poppies and a few crocusses, irises, col- chicums, foxgloves, valerians, larkspurs, corn-flowers, wild pinks, forget-me- nots, gillyflowers and mallows and the rose, still almost a sweet briar. These alone smiled upon our forefathers, who, for that matter, were unaware of their poverty. "Man had not yet learned to look around him, to enjoy the life of nature--then came the Renaissance, the great voyages, and the discovery of flowers more beautiful and more numerous than formerly. "You will no doubt have just noticed the first mention of flowers with scents... the violet, lily, iris, gilly-flower and the sweet briar, but if we now begin to make a more extensive listing we come across the geraniums, stocks, primulas, hyacinths, narcissi, alyssums, saxifrages, honeysuckles, clematis, wistaria, campanulas, sweet peas and the humble mignonette which Maeter- linck almost poetically described as 'hiding herself in the laboratory and silently distilling a perfume that gives us a foretaste of the air which we may breathe on the threshold of Paradise."' We must also spare a thought for the affectionately-named wild flowers of our fields, woodlands, water-meadows and hedgerows--the blue bell, poppy, bindweed, the buttercup, daisy, yarrow, sneeze-wort, bird's grounsel, lamb's lettuce, the columbines, field sages, shepherd's purse, ploughman's spikenard, the wood spurges, the noxious henbanes, nightshades and fox- gloves, the pimpernels, the cool mints, the purple thymes, the gentians, verbenas and Dyer's brooms. Of all these, and many more, Maeterlinck remarks: "They are interesting and incomprehensible, they are vaguely called the Weeds, but they keep the secret of a stubborn mission, they apparently serve no useful purpose, the simple rustic herbal remedies are dying out, but they are the indelible primarives and it is well to question them for they evidently have something to tell us." They have, for when these homely country and county names are supplanted by their scientific cognomens and located in their proper Natural Orders, I find that many of these apparently scentless prototypes are invariably followed by scented companions and where there is already some evidence of a scented proclivity,