In New York, before the Revolution, were many beautiful gardens, such as that of Madam Alexander on Broad Street, where in their proper season grew "paus bloemen of all hues, laylocks and tall May roses and snowballs intermixed with choice vegetables and herbs all bounded and hemmed in by huge rows of neatly clipped box edgings." We have a pretty picture also, in the letters of Catharine Rutherfurd, of an entire company gathering rose-leaves in June in Madam Clark's garden, and setting the rose-still at work to turn their sweet-scented spoils into rose-water. A trade in flower and vegetable seeds formed a lucrative and popular means by which women could earn a livelihood in colonial days. I have seen in one of the dingy little newspaper sheets of those days, in the large total of nine advertisements, contained therein, the announcements, by five Boston seedswomen, of lists of their wares. The earliest list of names of flower-seeds which I have chanced to note was in the _Boston Evening Post_ of March, 1760, and is of much interest as showing to us with exactness the flowers beloved and sought for at that time. They were "holly-hook, purple Stock, white Lewpins, Africans, blew Lewpins, candy-tuff, cyanus, pink, wall-flower, double larkin-spur, venus navelwort, brompton flock, princess feather, balsam, sweet-scented pease, carnation, sweet williams, annual stock, sweet feabus, yellow lewpins, sunflower, convolus minor, catch-fly, ten week stock, globe thistle, globe amaranthus, nigella, love-lies-bleeding, casent hamen, polianthus, canterbury bells, carnation poppy, india pink, convolus major, Queen Margrets." This is certainly a very pretty list of flowers, nearly all of which are still loved, though sometimes under other names--thus the Queen Margrets are our asters. And the homely old English names seem to bring the flowers to our very sight, for we do not seem to be on very friendly intimacy, on very sociable terms with flowers, unless they have what Miss Mitford calls "decent, well-wearing English names"; we can have no flower memories, no affections that cling to botanical nomenclature. Yet nothing is more fatal to an exact flower knowledge, to an acquaintance that shall ever be more than local, than a too confident dependence on the folk-names of flowers. Our bachelor's-buttons are ragged sailors in a neighboring state; they are corn-pinks in Plymouth, ragged ladies in another town, blue bottles in England, but cyanus everywhere. Ragged robin is, in the garden of one friend, a pink, in another it flaunts as London-pride, while the true glowing London-pride has half a dozen pseudonyms in as many different localities, and only really recognizes itself in the botany. An American cowslip is not an English cowslip, an American primrose is no English primrose, and the English daisy is no country friend of ours in America.