All over the garden were more wallflowers bursting by the thousand into bloom. Some beds were a mixture of clear bright yellow flowers, combined with the sort that are a deep mahogany, looking as though they were made of velvet; other beds had a pretty rose-pink variety; while on the top of more walls, and in corners and patches about the garden, were the old-fashioned “streaky” kinds, all aglow with brown and yellow.
The long bed in front of the porch, given over to cowslips, oxlips, polyanthus, auriculas, and suchlike homely flowers, was very gay. The polyanthus were a delightful medley of claret colour, pink, brown, crimson, orange, yellow, most of them looking as though the edges of the petals had been buttonholed around with silk of a contrasting colour. It seemed as though the flowers in this bed fairly tip-toed as we came along the path, and stretched their necks as high as ever they could, from out of their crinkled leaves, to show how remarkably fine they were.
In the narrow beds under the cottage windows double daffodils made plenty of colour, and at the edge were clumps of primroses—various shades of pink and crimson. These had seeded over into the path, with the result that baby primrose-plants were coming up cheerily between the rough flagstones. The ordinary yellow primrose was starring the grass all about the orchard, where wild daffodils were swaying by the hundred. The white flowers of the blackthorn were like snowdrifts on the hedges.
It was so wonderful, after the bleak, cheerless aspect of town, to come upon this world of smiling growing things. The soft air, sweeping over the hills, brought the scent of ploughed fields and newly-turned earth, of bursting buds and opening blossoms, with the ozone of the sea, and the salt of the weed that lies on the rocks around the lighthouse in the far-away distance.
There seemed to be an all-pervading peace that laid hold of one’s very soul; and yet you could not say it was really quiet, for birds were giving rival concerts in every tree, and quite a number were devoting their energies to saying insulting things to the newcomers and the small dog who had taken the liberty of encroaching on their ancient heritage. They are not sufficiently grateful for the fact that I leave my woods uncut, and undisturbed, as bird sanctuaries.
Lambs were bleating in the valley meadows; the spring gurgled cheerfully outside the gate as it tumbled out of the spout into the pool below.
We stood in the garden for a moment to take a good breath, and drink in as much of the beauty as we could, when Virginia just touched my arm and looked towards a long belt of trees—mostly oak and fir—that runs down one side of the garden and orchards, linking the larch woods up above us with the birch and hazel coppice down below—the coppice where the nightingales sing, and the tiny wrens and the tomtits build, and where the little dormouse lives, who comes out from among the undergrowth, with no apparent fear, when I stand in the wood-path and softly whistle.
This barricade of trees was originally left standing when the rest of the ground was cleared, to screen the house from the winter gales. But we have named it the Squirrels’ Highway.
Sure enough, as we stood there silent and motionless, down came one little bushy tail from the upper woods, followed by another, probably his wife. They leapt from branch to branch, and from tree to tree, nibbling a young oak shoot here, sniffing delicately at a few leaves somewhere else.