"Are you yourself familiar with that wild garden?"
"Yes."
"I ask you to show the jury, on this map, the location and extent of the wild garden. And describe it in your own words, if you will."
Tense but self-contained, Mrs. Jason stood by the map, her hands moving intelligently, her voice firm and rather pleasant. Mann recalled that she had given her age as forty-seven; his own age; more weathered than himself in the face, but an outdoor type, possibly better preserved, her figure attractive and graceful. "The wild garden area is roughly square, about a hundred feet on a side. It's closed away from the lawn by a mixed hedge of forsythia and lilac. There's only one break in that hedge, an angled passage about two feet wide. It's marked here—"
"Angled—you mean the opening is on a slant?"
"Double slant, zigzag. The hedge is ten or twelve feet thick—that forsythia will take over everything. I understand the little passage has to be pruned out fresh every year."
"If it's a zigzag, then you can't look through from the lawn area into the wild garden—is that correct?"
"Correct. From the lawn it looks like an unbroken hedge. Well, the wild garden itself is just a patch where everything's been left more or less natural. There's an old paper birch. Hardy perennials."
"In earlier testimony, the plant monkshood was mentioned in connection with that wild garden. Have you seen it growing there?"
"Yes." She spoke reluctantly, returning to the witness chair.