This section is from the book "The Gardener's Monthly And Horticulturist V28", by Thomas Meehan. See also: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long.
A correspondent inquires whether she is not correct insisting that the Eglantine of English poetry is the Sweet-brier? This has been so often gone over in these pages, that only for the inquiry it would hardly seem necessary to revert to it. So far as poetry is concerned, Milton's L'Allegro would seem to be decisive. "Though the sweet-brier, or the vine, or the twisted eglantine," is certainly decisive that this great poet had distinct plants in his mind. We never heard it doubted till meeting with the doubt among American writers, that English authors and English and French people, meant the dog-rose, when speaking of the eglantine.
 
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