But even when the flower or plant is something better than a “touch” of colour, there is often some gross carelessness, or ignorance, which gives a sense of annoyance rather than of pleasure. Each returning year, the _Gardeners’ Chronicle_ reviews the Royal Academy from a botanical point of view, and nothing can be droller than the blunders it points out. Sometimes all sorts of flowers of various seasons are growing together, or a wood, through which a knight is riding, is adorned with agarics and fungi that belong to different periods of the year. Sometimes places, no less than times, are set at nought, as in an instance quoted by Mr. Rossetti from the Exhibition of 1868, where a Greek maiden is gathering blossoms from a pot of (American) azaleas. But, indeed, such instances are only too common. In how many modern classical pictures, for example, has not the large sunflower of America been introduced? But when the flower itself is one important part of the picture, how curiously unsatisfactory is too often the result! No one has tried more earnestly to set our painters right in these matters than Mr. Ruskin, and how little even now have they profited by his teaching! They catch hold of a suggestion, as when he once told them (_showed_ them, we might say) that a spray of pink apple-blossom against a blue sky was beautiful, and the next exhibition or two abounded in blossoming apple-boughs: but they seem unable to grasp a principle. It was in 1851, in his tract on “Pre-Raphaelitism,” that he urged the painting of “the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they nestle in the clefts of the rocks;” and this last year, while speaking of the same artist, Mr. Hunt, he has had to repeat the same lesson, that plants that grow are pleasanter objects than flowers that are gathered. And, indeed, the reason is not far to seek. A bunch of garden-roses thrown carelessly down upon a mossy bank—and there is scarcely an exhibition without one—not only gives one a feeling of incongruity (as though the fashionable flowers were out at a picnic), but a stronger feeling still of coming death. We know those roses must wither and die, almost, we fancy, as we look upon them. No dew that falls can now keep them alive, as it will the humble moss—so much better than they—on which they rest. And it is almost worse when the poor gathered flowers are brought indoors and placed in some blue jar or Salviati vase, and the artist shows how carefully he can draw, not so much the petals of the flowers as the texture of the porcelain or the iridescence of the glass. It is difficult enough worthily to paint the light and glow of colour in any beautiful flower, but, if it is to be painted, let it be when the plant is still growing, and as it grows. Any garden will give subjects enough, if they are only sought for. Here is a bank of daffodils; here the white narcissus and the red anemone have formed a group; here a blue forget-me-not