January, but beside him bloomed abundantly that lovely drooping jasmine
called in the books _jasminum multiflorum_.

"Can you tell me what shrub this is?"

"That, sor, is the _monthly flora!_ Thim as don't know the but-hanical
nayum sometimes calls it the stare jismin, but the but-hanical nayum is
the _monthly flora_."

The inquirer spoke his thanks and passed on, but an eager footfall
overtook him, his elbow felt a touch, and the high title came a third
time: "The but-hanical nayum is the _monthly flora_."

The querist passed on, warmed by a grateful esteem for one who, though
doubtless a skilled and frequent tinkler of the lawn-mower within its
just limitations, was no mere dragoon of it, but kept a regard for
things higher than the bare sod, things of grace in form, in bloom, in
odor, and worthy of "but-hanical nayum." No mere chauffeur he, of the
little two-wheeled machine whose cult, throughout the most of our land,
has all but exterminated ornamental gardening.

In New Orleans, where it has not conquered, there is no crowding for
room. A ten-story building is called there a sky-scraper. The town has
not a dozen in all, and not one of that stature is an apartment or
tenement house. Having felled her surrounding forests of cypress and
drained the swamps in which they stood, she has at command an open plain
capable of housing a population seven times her present three hundred
and fifty thousand, if ever she chooses to build skyward as other cities
do.

But this explains only why New Orleans _might_ have gardens, not why she
chooses to have them, and has them by thousands, when hundreds of other
towns that have the room--and the lawns--choose not to have the
shrubberies, vines and flowers, or have them without arrangement. Why
should New Orleans so exceptionally choose to garden, and garden with
such exceptional grace? Her house-lots are extraordinarily numerous in
proportion to the numbers of her people, and that is a beginning of the
explanation; but it is only a beginning. Individually the most of those
lots are no roomier than lots elsewhere. Thousands of them, prettily
planted, are extremely small.

The explanation lies mainly in certain peculiar limitations, already
hinted, of her--democracy! That is to say, it lies in her fences. Her
fences remain, her democracy is different from the Northern variety. The
difference may consist only in faults both there and here which we all
hope to see democracy itself