The pruning and trimming of all the Ivy walls and festoons have been done. The result for the time is as ugly as it is desirable. Ivy grows so lavishly here that it has to be kept well in hand, and many whom it favours less have said they envied us our Ivy. More than once we have had to choose between some tree or a canopy of Ivy. It is like a beautiful carpet underneath a long row of Elms, where nothing else would grow; indeed, wherever there happen to be bits too overshadowed for grass or otherwise unsatisfactory, we put in Ivy; it is sure to understand, and to do what is required. My favourite sort is the wild English Ivy, and no other has a right to grow on the house. Its growth is slow and sure; it always grows to beauty, and never to over-richness. The loveliness of its younger shoots and of the deeply cut leaves might inspire either poet or painter! To either I would say, Wherever on your tree, or fence, or house-wall you find it beginning to spring, cherish it; for years it will do no harm, and if you are true to your art, and therefore know that small things are not too small for you, it will repay your love a hundredfold. Wild Ivy is best where it comes up of itself; it clings then so close and flat. A thrush sat on her nest, built on quite the outside of a Holly, two feet from the ground, while the men were at work pruning an Ivy wall—large swathes of Ivy falling close to her. She had faith in us, and never feared.
Our grove of white Arums in the greenhouse is still a fine sight—plants from four to five feet high, with enormous leaves. The spathes, however, though fine, are less so than at first, when many of them measured over eight inches across. The Maréchal Niel Rose will not give us this season anything like the six hundred great yellow roses we have had from him these last three years. He seems to be failing a little, somehow. But every morning I have a foretaste of summer in the glowing heap of beautiful roses of several kinds, brought in to me before breakfast. And with them there are Gloxinias, marvellous in their size and splendour of deep colouring. They are succeeding a lot of most curious-looking Tydæas—orange and dusky pink, profusely spotted. Both these flowers surprise one by the length of time they remain fresh when cut.
APRIL.
“To the Wise a Fact is True Poetry, and,
the most Beautiful of Fables.”—Emerson.
VII.
APRIL.
Of Daffodils—Coltsfoot—An Archangel—Gold Wrens and the little Vedova.
April 9.—The garden is full of Daffodils. Yellow flowers and green leaves form a most beautiful combination of colours when laid on by Nature’s hand. Every part of the garden now has its show of single or double Daffodils, and yet there is not one too many. Lovely always, they are loveliest, perhaps, when growing in the grass. There, “the green world they live in” shows them off better than when surrounded by garden mould. Excepting one large single flowering plant under the east wall, our finest Daffodils grow in the cool north border. One thinks of “Enid” in her faded silk, like a blossom “that lightly breaks a faded flower-sheath” when the Daffodils appear. Indeed, one can scarcely look on them, in their beauty, without recalling the lines of some familiar quotation; mine shall only be from the children’s nursery song-book—