Burbidge I found busily occupied in dividing the roots of the violets.
All through the winter, when frosts bound the ground, he sent me in fragrant bunches of the double Neapolitan violet, varied by bouquets of the Czar, the Princess of Wales, and the red purple of Admiral Avalon.
Now all the roots were being lifted from the frames, and little runners with minute fibrous roots planted, some eight inches apart, in shady corners.
During the summer, Burbidge and his boys will cut off every runner or blossom that may appear on these plants, and keep them, to use his expression, “round as a nest.” “I likes,” he said, “to give ’em hearts like cabbages.” The first week in September, the violet roots will be replaced in the frames “for winter blowing.”
In the mean time the frames are to be cleared, the soil renewed, and then sown with asters, zinnias, and my beautiful golden lettuces, that come over every year from the Austrian seedsman.
Next to the frames, in little narrow beds, were lines of choice daffodils, and I stopped to look at them. They were of the largest and most effective kinds. There was Emperor, and Empress, Horsfieldi, Sir Watkin Wynn, Golden Spur, Mrs. Langtry, and beautiful Madame de Graaf, and the brilliant sunset glory of Orange Phœnix.
They made a brave show and found great favour in my old gardener’s eyes. “Nothing mean about they,” he said, only the day before, complacently to me. “Look to the size. They be near the girth of roses, and fit for any nobleman’s garden.” The old man seemed to swell with pride as we looked at them together. I had not the heart to be disagreeable and to suggest that any should be plucked for vases, or to deck the altar bowls, and I saw that my old friend was relieved.
A little later I walked up the trim path empty-handed and peeped into the gooseberry and currant cages. The cages are made of fine wire netting, fixed on poles, about twenty feet square, in which were planted currants and gooseberries, to save their fruit from the wild birds. Burbidge joined me. “So,” he said, “they has nothing inside to rob them, not a ‘nope’” (as he calls the bullfinch), “nor them mischievous ‘poke-puddings’” (by which name some folks here call the tomtits) “can interfere.”
A BULLFINCH CAN DO NO WRONG
Hearing my favourites, the bullfinches, attacked, I could not help saying something in their defence. “The cock ‘nope,’ as you call him, is so beautiful,” I urged, “that surely he may have a few buds in spring, and later on get a little fruit? Besides,” I added warmly, “many people now say that he does no damage, and that the buds, that he attacks, are already diseased, and, anyway, would bear no fruit.”