The Compleat Florist

"One of the bits I particularly like in this book is a lovely paragraph which reminds me of the other day. There were two ladies going round my garden, and one had to pick up every single petal and every single flower she was talking about. And I was thinking to myself, “I cannot control myself with this women, I am going to kill her if she touches one more thing!” And then in The Compleat Florist , you get a very similar situation all those years ago in 1706. It starts off, “When some folks get into a garden, they are not satisfied if they do not handle the flowers. Now to a true florist this practise is downright uncivil, because in handling a flower we tarnish it and we break in upon its ordinary position, and often times occasion its being damped.” So there is this man who felt just the same as I do, but some 300 years before me."