I am sure that the most peaceful part of our Garden of Peace is the Place of Roses. The place of roses in the time of roses is one bower. It grew out of the orchard ground which I had turned into a lawn in exchange for the grassy space which I had turned into the House Garden. The grass came very rapidly when I had grubbed up the roots of the old plums and cherries. But then we found that the stone-edged beds and the central fountain had not really taken possession, so to speak, of the House Garden. This had still the character of a lawn for all its bedding, and could not be mown in less than two hours.
And just as I was becoming impressed with this fact, a gentle general dealer came to me with the inquiry f a tall wooden pillar would be of any use to me. I could not tell him until I had seen it, and when I had seen it and bought it and had it conveyed home I could not tell him.
It was a fluted column of wood, nearly twenty feet high and two in diameter, with a base and a carved Corinthian capital—quite an imposing object, but, as usual, the people at the auction were so startled by having brought before them something to which they were unaccustomed, they would not make a bid for it, and my dealer, who has brought me many an embarrassing treasure, got it fur the ten shillings at which he had started it.
It lay on the grass where it had been left by the carters, giving to the landscape for a whole week the semblance of the place of the Parthenon or the Acropolis; but on the seventh day I clearly saw that one cannot possess a white elephant without making some sacrifices for that distinction, and I resolved to sacrifice the new lawn to my hasty purchase. There are few things in the world dearer than a bargain, and none more irresistible. Rut, as it turned out, this was altogether an exceptional thing—as a matter of fact, all my bargains are. I made it stand in the centre of the lawn and I saw the place transformed.
It occupied no more than a patch less than a yard 'n diameter; but it dominated the whole neighbourhood. On one side of the place there is a range of shrubs on a small mound, making people who stand by the new pend of water-lilies believe that they have come to the bottom of the garden; on another side is the old Saxon earthwork, now turned into an expanse of things herbaceous, with a long curved grass path under the ancient castle walls; down the full length of the third side runs a pergola, giving no one a glimpse of a great breadth of rose-beds or of the colonnade beyond, where the sweet-briers have their own way.
There was no reason that I could see (now that I had set my heart on the scheme) why I should not set up a gigantic rose pillar in the centre of the lawn and see what would happen.
What actually did happen before another year had passed was the erecting of a tall pillar which looked so lonely in the midst of the grass—a lighthouse marking a shoal in a green sea—that I made four large round beds about it, at a distance of about twenty feet, and set up a nine-foot pillar in the centre of each, planting climbing roses of various sorts around it, hoping that in due time the whole should be incorporated and form a ring of roses about the towering centre column.