A most admirable servant of mine once risked his life to reach a magnificent Bornean orchid, and tried to poison me an hour later when he thought I was going to take the plant away from him. This does not mean necessarily that we should look with suspicion upon all gardeners and lovers of flowers. It emphasizes, rather, the fact of the universal and deep-rooted appreciation of the glories of the vegetable kingdom. Long before the fatal harvest time, I am certain that Eve must have plucked a spray of apple blossoms with perfect impunity.

A vast amount of bad poetry and a much less quantity of excellent verse has been written about flowers, much of which follows to the letter Mark Twain's injunction about Truth. It must be admitted that the relations existing between the honeysuckle and the bee are basely practical and wholly selfish. A butterfly's admiration of a flower is no whit less than the blossom's conscious appreciation of its own beauties. There are ants which spend most of their life making gardens, knowing the uses of fertilizers, mulching, planting seeds, exercising patience, recognizing the time of ripeness, and gathering the edible fruit. But this is underground, and the ants are blind.

There is a bird, however—the bower bird of Australia—which appears to take real delight in bright things, especially pebbles and flowers for their own sake. Its little lean-to, or bower of sticks, which has been built in our own Zoological Park in New York City, is fronted by a cleared space, which is usually mossy. To this it brings its colorful treasures, sometimes a score of bright star blossoms, which are renewed when faded and replaced by others. All this has, probably, something to do with courtship, which should inspire a sonnet.

From the first pre-Egyptian who crudely scratched a lotus on his dish of clay, down to the jolly Feckenham men, the human race has given to flowers something more than idle curiosity, something less than mere earnest of fruit or berry.

At twelve thousand feet I have seen one of my Tibetans with nothing but a few shreds of straw between his bare feet and the snow, probe around the south edge of melting drifts until he found brilliant little primroses to stick behind his ears. I have been ushered into the little-used, musty best-parlor of a New England farmhouse, and seen fresh vases of homely, old-fashioned flowers—so recently placed for my edification, that drops of water still glistened like dewdrops on the dusty plush mat beneath. I have sat in the seat of honor of a Dyak communal house, looked up at the circle of all too recent heads, and seen a gay flower in each hollow eye socket, placed there for my approval. With a cluster of colored petals swaying in the breeze, one may at times bridge centuries or span the earth.

And now as I sit writing these words in my jungle laboratory, a small dusky hand steals around an aquarium and deposits a beautiful spray of orchids on my table. The little face appears, and I can distinguish the high cheek bones of Indian blood, the flattened nose and slight kink of negro, and the faint trace of white—probably of some long forgotten Dutch sailor, who came and went to Guiana, while New York City was still a browsing ground for moose.

So neither race nor age nor mÉlange of blood can eradicate the love of flowers. It would be a wonderful thing to know about the first garden that ever was, and I wish that "Best Beloved" had demanded this. I am sure it was long before the day of dog, or cow, or horse, or even she who walked alone. The only way we can imagine it, is to go to some wild part of the earth, where are fortunate people who have never heard of seed catalogs or lawn mowers.

Here in British Guiana I can run the whole gamut of gardens, within a few miles of where I am writing. A mile above my laboratory up-river, is the thatched benab of an Akawai Indian—whose house is a roof, whose rooms are hammocks, whose estate is the jungle. Degas can speak English, and knows the use of my 28-gauge double barrel well enough to bring us a constant supply of delicious bushmeat—peccary, deer, monkey, bush turkeys and agoutis. But Grandmother has no language but her native Akawai. She is a good friend of mine, and we hold long conversations, neither of us bothering with the letter, but only the spirit of communication. She is a tiny person, bowed and wrinkled as only an old Indian squaw can be, always jolly and chuckling to herself, although Degas tells me that the world is gradually darkening for her. And she vainly begs me to clear the film which is slowly closing over her eyes. She labors in a true landscape garden—the small circle wrested with cutlass and fire from the great jungle, and kept free only by constant cutting of the vines and lianas which creep out almost in a night, like sinister octopus tentacles, to strangle the strange upstarts and rejungle the bit of sunlit glade.

Although to the eye a mass of tangled vegetation, an Indian's garden may be resolved into several phases—all utterly practical, with color and flowers as mere by-products. First come the provisions, for if Degas were not hunting for me, and eating my rations, he would be out with bow and blowpipe, or fish-hooks, while the women worked all day in the cassava field. It is his part to clear and burn the forest, it is hers to grub up the rich mold, to plant and to weed. Plots and beds are unknown, for in every direction are fallen trees, too large to burn or be chopped up, and great sprawling roots. Between these, sprouts of cassava and banana are stuck, and the yams and melons which form the food of these primitive people. Cassava is as vital to these Indians as the air they breathe. It is their wheat and corn and rice, their soup and salad and dessert, their ice and their wine, for besides being their staple food, it provides casareep which preserves their meat, and piwarie which, like excellent wine, brightens life for them occasionally, or dims it if overindulged in—which is equally true of food, or companionship, or the oxygen in the air we breathe.

Besides this cultivation, Grandmother has a small group of plants which are only indirectly concerned with food. One is kunami, whose leaves are pounded into pulp, and used for poisoning the water of jungle streams, with the surprising result that the fish all leap out on the bank and can be gathered as one picks up nuts. When I first visited Grandmother's garden, she had a few pitiful little cotton plants from whose stunted bolls she extracted every fiber and made a most excellent thread. In fact, when she made some bead aprons for me, she rejected my spool of cotton and chose her own, twisted between thumb and finger. I sent for seed of the big Sea Island cotton, and her face almost unwrinkled with delight when she saw the packets with seed larger than she had ever known.

Far off in one corner I make certain I have found beauty for beauty's sake, a group of exquisite caladiums and amaryllis, beautiful flowers and rich green leaves with spots and slashes of white and crimson. But this is the hunter's garden, and Grandmother has no part in it, perhaps is not even allowed to approach it. It is the beena garden—the charms for good luck in hunting. The similarity of the leaves to the head or other parts of deer or peccary or red-gilled fish, decides the most favorable choice, and the acrid, smarting juice of the tuber rubbed into the skin, or the hooks and arrows anointed, is considered sufficient to produce the desired result. Long ago I discovered that this demand for immediate physical sensation was a necessary corollary of doctoring, so I always give two medicines—one for its curative properties, and the other, bitter, sour, acid or anything disagreeable, for arousing and sustaining faith in my ability.

The Indian's medicine plants, like his true name, he keeps to himself, and although I feel certain that Grandmother had somewhere a toothache bush, or pain leaves—yarbs and simples for various miseries—I could never discover them. Half a dozen tall tobacco plants brought from the far interior, eked out the occasional tins of cigarettes in which Degas indulged, and always the flame-colored little buck-peppers lightened up the shadows of the benab, as hot to the palate as their color to the eye.

One day just as I was leaving, Grandmother led me to a palm nearby, and to one of its ancient frond-sheaths was fastened a small brown branch to which a few blue-green leaves were attached. I had never seen anything like it. She mumbled and touched it with her shriveled, bent fingers. I could understand nothing, and sent for Degas, who came and explained grudgingly, "Me no know what for—toko-nook just name—have got smell when yellow." And so at last I found the bit of uselessness, which, carried onward and developed in ages to come, as it had been elsewhere in ages past, was to evolve into botany, and back-yard gardens, and greenhouses, and wars of roses, and beautiful paintings, and music with a soul of its own, and verse more than human. To Degas the toko-nook was "just name," "and it was nothing more." But he was forgiven, for he had all unwittingly sowed the seeds of religion, through faith in his glowing caladiums. But Grandmother, though all the sunlight seemed dusk, and the dawn but as night, yet clung to her little plant, whose glory was that it was of no use whatsoever, but in months to come would be yellow, and would smell.

Farther down river, in the small hamlets of the bovianders—the people of mixed blood—the practical was still necessity, but almost every thatched and wattled hut had its swinging orchid branch, and perhaps a hideous painted tub with picketed rim, in which grew a golden splash of croton. This ostentatious floweritis might furnish a theme for a wholly new phase of the subject—for in almost every respect these people are less worthy human beings—physically, mentally and morally—than the Indians. But one cannot shift literary overalls for philosophical paragraphs in mid-article, so let us take the little river steamer down stream for forty miles to the coast of British Guiana, and there see what Nature herself does in the way of gardens. We drive twenty miles or more before we reach Georgetown, and the sides of the road are lined for most of the distance with huts and hovels of East Indian coolies and native Guiana negroes. Some are made of boxes, others of bark, more of thatch or rough-hewn boards and barrel staves, and some of split bamboo. But they resemble one another in several respects—all are ramshackle, all lean with the grace of Pisa, all have shutters and doors, so that at night they may be hermetically closed, and all are half-hidden in the folds of a curtain of flowers. The most shiftless, unlovely hovel, poised ready to return to its original chemical elements, is embowered in a mosaic of color, which in a northern garden would be worth a king's ransom—or to be strictly modern, should I not say a labor foreman's or a comrade's ransom!

The deep trench which extends along the front of these sad dwellings is sometimes blue with water hyacinths; next the water disappears beneath a maze of tall stalks, topped with a pink mist of lotus; then come floating lilies and more hyacinths. Wherever there is sufficient clear water, the wonderful curve of a cocoanut palm is etched upon it, reflection meeting palm, to form a dendritic pattern unequaled in human devising.

Over a hut of rusty oil-cans, bougainvillia stretches its glowing branches, sometimes cerise, sometimes purple, or allamanders fill the air with a golden haze from their glowing search-lights, either hiding the huts altogether, or softening their details into picturesque ruins. I remember one coolie dwelling which was dirtier and less habitable than the meanest stable, and all around it were hundreds upon hundreds of frangipanni blooms—the white and gold temple flowers of the East—giving forth of scent and color all that a flower is capable, to alleviate the miserable blot of human construction. Now and then a flamboyant tree comes into view, and as, at night, the head-lights of an approaching car eclipse all else, so this tree of burning scarlet draws eye and mind from adjacent human-made squalor. In all the tropics of the world I scarcely remember to have seen more magnificent color than in these unattended, wilful-grown gardens.

In tropical cities such as Georgetown, there are very beautiful private gardens, and the public one is second only to that of Java. But for the most part one is as conscious of the very dreadful borders of brick, or bottles, or conchs, as of the flowers themselves. Some one who is a master gardener will some day write of the possibilities of a tropical garden, which will hold the reader as does desire to behold the gardens of Carcassonne itself.