His is the last conservatory on this hemisphere—at least I've heard tell it is.
He lets me walk up and down its long blossom-bordered aisles whenever I am so minded. Here, in his floral sanctuary, one may take deep draughts from the warm subtly-scented air till, someway or other, it is transmuted into the alembic of the soul.
May no blight fall on his roses or his heart! May God love him and let him live long!
This man's roses are of ivory and pink, but a few are red as if they might be the blood of some great wounded queen.
Nearly all the roses are long-winged and heavy-headed. They could not be otherwise when they come and go from the land where dreams are born. Once, a poet told that the soul of a rose went into his blood. This was how he came to write the Idylls of the King.
One of the gardeners ties the red roses to stakes and he will not have it that the habit is cruel. "You may have noticed, Lady"—and here he tightly draws the cord—"that most folk are hung by their sweethearts." I almost hate this man.
Hath not a rose-tree organs, passions, senses? If you prick it does it not bleed? Verily I say unto you that it hath and it does.
It is near to April before the lilies are at flood-tide. You must needs see them before Passion Week when the gardeners cut and send them to a large hungry place called down the line, where, in prairie churches of tin and pine and sod, the Eastertide worshippers consider the lily and sing songs about death and life.
Not an inch of space is lost in the long lines where, tall and lissome, the stalks bend and curtsy to the passer-by. The glory of the lily is short-lived, for always they are cut off in maturity. The message they give is not one of prophecy and resurrection as the writers have ever taught. You may hear the message if you are still enough. "There is no second flowering time" they whisper. "Love while life doth last."
But, after all, the lilies are white like the snow outside, so that I esteem the big purple hyacinths better, and the bobbing daffodils.