Our peony beds—the mistress of the garden did know that peonies are slow ladies and will take their time—are beginning to reward her forbearance. Such a basketful as came into her bedroom to-day with the Polyantha roses!—those large, pink, scented beauties which are so satisfying to settle in big bowls. We have put them in the chapel against boughs of the service-tree. The effect is all one could wish.
The service-tree bloomed this year as never it bloomed before. It looked like the bridal bouquet of a fairy giantess! We trust this daring hyperbole will enable our readers to represent to themselves something at once immense and ethereal, misty grey, and delicate silver-white. It is of huge size and beautiful shape, and grows a little higher on the slope than the greater of the two beech-trees. For colour effect we know nothing more soul-filling than the way it stands between the ardent tawny glories of the Azalea Walk and the young jewel green of its cousin—the beech above mentioned. Put the shoulder of the moor at the back in its May mantle of coppery mauve heather not yet in bud—that is a picture to gaze upon under a blue sky, thanking God for the loveliness of the earth!
This last May, which will be ever memorable as one of the most tragic months of the war, hazard—or that slithy tove, the alien Hun—provided us with a background approximately macabre for the radiant youthful joy. Our moor has been burnt—five fires started simultaneously one day of high east wind, and the first great swelling hill is covered with a garment as of hell. The scattered fir-trees here and there are of a livid, scorched brown. To look out on the scene and see them stand in the slaty black, casting mysterious shadows under the dome of relentless brightness we have had of late, is like looking upon a circle of Dante’s Inferno, out of one of the cool, bowery regions of his upper Purgatorio. Our daughter finds a wilder beauty in our blossom and verdure against the savage gloom beyond; but not so the Padrona. She laments the tapestry of her peaceful, rolling heights. Now, past mid-June, bracken is creeping slowly through the charred roots of the heather, and she does not want a bracken hill. It is spreading democracy, taking the place of some royal line; the rule of the irresponsible, the coarse, the mediocre; though she grants there will be beauty in the autumn when it all turns golden. And perhaps there’s a lesson to be drawn somewhere, but she will have none of it, for there is nothing so tiresome as the unpalatable moral.
Fox has condescended to remain another week, so we need not feverishly search garden chronicles for the quite impossible he, who shall be strong, sturdy, ineligible for the army, and willing to take a place as under-gardener at something less than the honorarium of an aniline dye expert! All those who want places are head-gardeners, “under glass”; except “a young Dutchman speaking languages perfectly” who fills our souls with doubt. In every district it is the same story; we wish we could think it was all patriotic ardour, but we are afraid that the high wages offered by camps and greengrocers are responsible for a good deal of the shortage of labour in our part of the world.
One of the Villino quartette—we call ourselves the lucky clover-leaf—writes from Dorset that they have an aged man of past seventy-two who comes in to help in the flowery, bowery old garden of the manor-house where she is staying. In justice to simple rural Dorset, it may be mentioned parenthetically that there the response to the country’s need has been extraordinary in its unanimity. So the superannuated labourers who have grown white and wise over the soil, instead of sitting by the chimney-corner and enjoying their old-age pensions, come tottering forth to do their little bit, in the place of the young stalwartness that has gone out to fight and struggle and perhaps die for England.
Our Dorset clover petal writes: “Old Mason is very sad at having to water the borders. ‘Ye mid water and water for days and days,’ he declares, ‘and it not have the value of a single night’s rain. There, miss, as I did say to my darter last night, my Father, I says, he do water a deal better than I do.’”
Yesterday there came a box of white pinks from that Dorset garden; these have been put all together into an immense cut-glass bowl, with an effect of innocent, white, overflowing freshness that is perfect of its kind. And the scent of them is admirably fitted to the sweet clean wonder of their looks. It is a quintessence of all simple fragrance, a sort of intensified new-mown hay smell. That is another thing the heavenly Father has done very well—the delicate matching of attributes in His flower children. A tea-rose looks her scent, just as does her deep crimson sister.
“How it must have amused Almighty God,” said our daughter one day last winter, lifting the cineraria foliage to show the purple bloom of the lining which exactly matched the note of the starry flower, “how it must have amused Him to do this.”
And surely a violet bears in her little modest face the promise of her insinuating and delicate perfume.