"O Columbine, open your folded wrapper,
Where two twin turtle-doves dwell."
But she is confusing the Columbine with the Monk's Hood. The doves of the Columbine cluster round the centre like the doves of Pliny's vase. The doves of the Monk's Hood are only seen as you remove the "wrapper," and then the old idea was that they are drawing a "Venus' chariot."
The accidental grouping of plants on a mixed border is often very happy. A week or two back I found growing out of a tuft of Forget-me-not a plant of the Black Fritillary. The blue eyes of the Forget-me-not seemed to be looking up into the hanging bells of the Fritillary, and were a pleasant contrast to the red-brown of its petals. Gerarde's name for the Fritillary was the "Turkie or Ginnie-hen Flower," and the name of the Fritillary was itself derived from the fritillus or dice-box, which the common Fritillary was supposed to resemble in its markings.
In the middle of each group of beds, which the grass walk divides, is a circular bed full of American shrubs. Among these shrubs are several rather fine Kalmias. Very often they do not flower at all, or at best bear a bloom only here and there. This year they are laden with blossom, which is now just ready to burst, and I shall have a show of Kalmia flowers such as I have not seen, since two-and-twenty years ago, I wandered among the Kalmia brakes in the forests of Virginia; and the flower is so beautiful—pink outside, and, as Ruskin says, inside "like the beating out of bosses in hollow silver, beaten out apparently in each petal by the stamens instead of a hammer."
Another bed, which will be very effective in a day or two, is a bed of the double Persian Brier, pegged and trained. The festoons of yellow buds are all but out, and will be one mass of sweet and lovely little Roses.
The Nemophila bed has done very well, but we did not plant it as thickly as we should have done, and there are bare places here and there.
I have still to mention the great bushes, or rather trees, of Hawthorn, of which some stand in front of the dining-room windows, while others fling their perfume across the hedge that divides the garden and the croft. There is another Lancashire May song, from which I cannot but quote a few lines, as it is but little known. The Mayers come to the door and sing (or sang, rather, for the custom no longer holds with us):—
"We have been rambling all this night,
And almost all this day;
And now, returned back again,
We've brought you a branch of May.
A branch of May we have brought you,
And at your door it stands;
It is but a sprout, but it's well budded out,
By the work of our Lord's hands."