gardening is a creative activity. It absorbs a lover of gardening in the same way as poetry absorbs a poet or painting absorbs a painter. It is more concrete than poetry and painting and has a more universal appeal. Even children and the unlettered, who cannot enjoy poetry and painting without developing the skill of interpreting symbols represented by words or colours derive immense aesthetic
pleasure from the shape, colour and smell of plants, grass and flowers that abound in the well laid out garden. Moreover, garden provides an inexhaustible source of poems and paintings all over the world. Gardening keeps the body fit while it refreshes the mind. Garden is nature made to order. It is the box where sweets compacted lie. There is no end to the refinement which can be brought about in a garden through the myriad shades of colour of plants and flowers and the fragrance associated with them. Keats has captured the excess of a garden's charm in his famous 'Ode to a nightingale'.
"1 cannot see what flowers are at my feet Or what soft incense hangs upon the boughs But in embalmed darkness guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket and the fruit tree wild White hawthorn, and the pastoral egalantine Fast fading violets covered up in leaves And Mid-May's eldest child,
The coming muskrose, full of dewy wine The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves".
Garden is a home to many a species of butterflies which lend charm to the ver- dant looks of the garden. Some beautiful birds, too,
