The gardener particularly needs such a provision as this
Institution affords. His gains are not great; he knows gold and
silver more as being of the colour of fruits and flowers than by
its presence in his pockets; he is subjected to that kind of labour
which renders him peculiarly liable to infirmity; and when old age
comes upon him, the gardener is of all men perhaps best able to
appreciate the merits of such an institution.

To all indeed, present and absent, who are descended from the first


"gardener Adam and his wife,"


the benefits of such a society are obvious. In the culture of
flowers there cannot, by their very nature, be anything, solitary
or exclusive. The wind that blows over the cottager's porch,
sweeps also over the grounds of the nobleman; and as the rain
descends on the just and on the unjust, so it communicates to all
gardeners, both rich and poor, an interchange of pleasure and
enjoyment; and the gardener of the rich man, in developing and
enhancing a fruitful flavour or a delightful scent, is, in some
sort, the gardener of everybody else.

The love of gardening is associated with all conditions of men, and
all periods of time. The scholar and the statesman, men of peace
and men of war, have agreed in all ages to delight in gardens. The
most ancient people of the earth had gardens where there is now
nothing but solitary heaps of earth. The poor man in crowded
cities gardens still in jugs and basins and bottles: in factories