I remember how a perfect poem of a garden was translated into the most repulsively correct prose by the exertions of a botanist. It was in a semi-public pleasure ground maintained by subscribers of a guinea each, and of course it was administered by a Committee. After many years of failure, an admirable head-gardener was found--a young and enthusiastic man with eye for design and an appreciation of form as well as colour. Within a short space of time he turned a commonplace pleasure-ground into a thing of beauty; and, not content with making the enormous domed conservatory and the adjoining hothouse a blaze of colour and fragrance, he attacked an old worn-out greenhouse and, without asking for outside assistance, transformed it into a natural sub-tropical landscape--palms and cacti and giant New Zealand ferns, growing amid rocky surroundings, and wonderful lilies filling a large natural basin, below an effective cascade. The place was just what such a place should be, conveying the best idea possible to have of a moist corner of a tropical forest, only without the overwhelming shabbiness which was the most striking note of every tropical forest I have ever seen in a natural condition. In addition to its attractiveness in this respect, it would have become a source of financial profit to the subscribers, for the annual “thinning out” of its superfluous growths would mean the stocking of many private conservatories. On the Committee of Management, however, there was one gentleman whose aim in life was to be regarded by his fellow-tradesmen as a great botanist: he was, to a great botanist, what the writer of the cracker mottoes is to a great poet, or the compiler of the puzzle-page of a newspaper is to a great mathematician; but he was capable of making a fuss and convincing a bunch of tradesmen that making a fuss is a proof of superiority; and that botany and beauty are never to be found in association. He condemned the tropical garden as an abomination, because it was impossible that a place which could give hospitality to a growth of New Zealand fern, _Phormium Hookeri_, should harbour a sago palm _Metroxylon Elatum_, which was not indigenous to New Zealand; and then he went on to talk about the obligations of the place to be educational and not ornamental, showing quite plainly that to be botanical should be the highest aim of any one anxious for the welfare of his country. The result of his harangue was the summoning of the head-gardener before the Board and his condemnation on the ground that he had put the Beautiful in the place that should be occupied by the Educational. He was ordered to abandon that unauthorised hobby of his for gratifying the senses of foolish people who did not know the difference between _Phormium Hookeri_ and _Metroxylon Elatum_, and to set to work to lay out an Educational Garden.