But there are all sorts of oddments, some things you do not expect and some things you do. The cowslip bed is very pretty. Here are yellow, orange, copper-coloured and mahogany brown cowslips; pale-coloured oxlips, and polyanthuses in as many shades as the wallflowers, from rosy red to dark purple-brown with every petal edged with bright yellow as though they had been buttonholed round.
There is no need to cultivate primroses in the garden beds, for the two orchards are thick with them; where there are also large patches of wild snowdrops with crowds of wild daffodils, and dancing wind-flowers—or wood anemones; while tall spikes of the pale mauve spotted orchises grow in the grass around the edge near the walls.
Before the wallflowers have finished flowering the tulips are out, the old-fashioned “cottage tulips,” many of them, tall and with large cup-like flowers—pink and crimson, brown and yellow, showy “parrots,” and delicate mauve feathered with white, purple-black, deep maroon; such a brilliant army those tulips make, with hundreds of them in bloom at once.
Before the tulip petals have fallen, the peonies have opened out great heavy heads of flowers that can’t keep upright. The scarlet oriental poppies with their blue-black centres make masses of colour that have to be kept very much to themselves or they kill every other flower within reach; these are therefore planted near the clumps of white irises, and the deep blue and pure white perennial lupins, that make a beautiful show all down one border.
Speaking of lupins reminds me of the tree-lupins. Virginia brought some harmless-looking little plants with her one year, remembering my love for lupins.
“These are tree-lupins,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t know what they will grow into, but the man said they were just like lupins, only much more so; therefore I bought them. Don’t blame me if they die.”
She planted them comfortably and cosily in a bed along with white foxgloves and pink pentstemons, all the members of this happy family looking about the same size.
The following year when Virginia visited the cottage she asked, “Where are my tree-lupins?” She was shown great bushes each the size of a round dining-table, and each holding aloft hundreds of yellow spikes, and filling the air with the scent of a bean-field. There were the tree-lupins all right! But where were the foxgloves and pentstemons?
Perhaps you think there must be large, dull spaces when the wallflowers cease blooming, but in between the wallflower plants are others coming on, and by the time the wallflowers have finished—and are ready to be pulled up—these beds are filling with sweet williams and snapdragons. The young plants were there, and they come into bloom as the wallflowers finish. And then, where only a short time before there were beds all purples and yellows and browns, you have now reds and pinks and every shade of rosy tint that the bright eyes of the sweet williams can produce.