“Well, I don’t think I ever saw a more wilted-looking blossom than that builder when he was finally had inside and given his marching orders. Even before the two had descended from the roof, the embroidered men were hurriedly toppling the earth back into the trenches. I believe they’ve had twenty-four hours allowed them to get things put to rights again. And I think they will hurry, for they don’t seem anxious for more of the master’s society than is absolutely necessary. At any rate, he seemed quite able to manage matters without any assistance from me, and so I left it in his hands, and I’m coming down by the next train.”
V
Just Outside the Back-Door
There is one spot in the Flower-Patch that is loved by grown-ups as well as birds. It is the little grotto that is just outside the cottage back-door. It has made itself by making the best of circumstances. Can I describe it so that you will see it, I wonder?
First there comes a narrow garden bed, full of old-fashioned flowers—Bee-balm, Jacob’s Ladder, and Solomon’s Seal; then a rough stone wall about two feet high keeps the earth above from tumbling down on to the narrow bed below. The whole of the garden being on a steeply sloping hillside, the earth has to be propped up at intervals by these lovely little ranks of natural rockery, planted by Nature with hart’s-tongue and a variety of other little ferns, with mother-of-millions and creeping ivy, with stone-crop and house-leeks. How do the things get there? How do they plant themselves? Isn’t it marvellous this unending gardening of Nature!
On a level with the top of the low wall is another garden bed. You see the ground is rising, rising up to the clouds all the time at the back of the cottage, just as it is falling, falling down to the river in the valley all the time in front of the cottage. This next terrace bed loses itself entirely in a miniature wild wood and drops down into a tiny dell, just big enough for a couple of small children to give a tea-party to the fairies in.
Here it is that the beauty of the whole place seems to climax. The other side of the dell is bounded by a large grey boulder, about six feet high, flanked by a few smaller ones tumbling about at various angles. The stone was too big for the original gardener to move, so he wisely left it where it was. They often do that on these hills. I know one cottage that has a most substantial stone table in the centre of the kitchen. It is just a huge stone that was too big to move by ordinary methods when they erected the cottage, and so they simply left it, and built the kitchen round it.
But my boulder in the grotto is not so much for use as for beauty. True, it supports a plum tree that springs up from behind it, just outside the orchard rails. But the way Nature has festooned that rock is worth going a long way to study. From the ground at one side springs a wild rose with stout stems that grow fairly straight and erect, considering it is a wild rose, and this sends out long curved and arched sprays, dotted with pink blossoms.