Hence you will see Virginia or Ursula in a large hat that is all brim, with basket on arm, and wearing an apron (not a lacy, frilly muslin thing, but a good-sized, well-made, old-fashioned lilac print apron), going up the garden and gathering broad beans, cutting young cauliflowers, or “curly greens,” or turnip tops, or a marrow, forking up potatoes, pulling carrots, collecting lettuces, spring onions, cress and other salading—all according to the season.
And if it should chance that you have never yourself put on a big apron, and cut your own vegetables before the dew is off them, then Virginia will be truly sorry for you.
There is plenty of time to be lazy, however; and a hot summer day means long leisure in this garden; for when the sun is high the brown pitcher rests (though the brown teapot does not) until the fir-trees throw shadows from the west.
All day you can sit in the shade at the bottom of the garden, looking up the hill at the wonderful mass of colour before you. Along the ridge of the cottage roof perches a row of swallows, chirping and chattering in their usual way. The starlings, who have built under the tiles, are ordering their respective families to cease clamouring for more, explaining that hunting caterpillars is hot work. Most other birds are quiet when the sun is fiercest, but over all the garden there is the hum, hum of thousands of industrious bees, while literally hundreds of white butterflies keep up a perpetual flutter over the tall blue spikes of bloom on the lavender bushes.
Even the small white dog with the brown ears ceases to tear about the garden, and bark at nothing in a consequential way; he just lies down on the edge of somebody’s dress, and hangs out a little pink tongue for air.
This is the time when the flower-patch among the hills spells Rest.
An old woman passing up the lane a few nights ago paused at the gate. “How them pinnies do blow, miss!” she said, gazing admiringly at a clump of peonies. Then she added—
“Ain’t it strange, now, that it do take a woman to make a flower garden? A man ain’t no good at that; he simply can’t help hisself a-running to veg’tables!”
But after thinking this over, and despite all that strong-minded womankind tells me to the contrary, I cannot really believe that there is such total depravity in the other sex!