Speckled thrushes hopped about and caught earthworms as they peered up through the lawns. On the stone steps leading up to the red-walled garden lay the broken remains of many dusky shells of the monks’ snails, or as the children call them here, “snail housen.” Beside these lay also broken fragments of beautiful yellow, and pale pink ones. A little later I walked into the garden to look at my great bed of roses. What a wonderful change one night of rain had made! How the shoots had lengthened, how “the blows,” as Burbidge calls them, had expanded. What a difference in the fat buds! The aphides, which seemed such a pest a week before, had vanished, while the leaves were refreshed and glittered with dew-drops.
Henricus Stephanus’ old lines came back to me—
“The rose, is the care and the love of the spring,
The rose is the pleasure of th’ heavenly Pow’rs;
The boy of fair Venus, Cyther’s darling,
Doth wrap his head round with garlands of rose
When to the dance of the graces he goes.”
Amongst my beautiful modern roses, I noted that La France was opening two delicious buds. What a beautiful rose it is; and what an exquisite perfume it possesses! Then I found a gorgeous Fisher Holmes, a General Jacqueminot, and a Captain Christy. All these had been born, as Bess calls it, in the night. Besides these modern joys, I paused to notice my old-world friends. I could not pass by without casting a glance upon the loves of Gerard and Parkinson. The pimpernel rose, little Scotch briars of different sorts, the little single rose without thorns, the damask, the yellow cabbage, and the splendid vermilion, the musk, the single cinnamon and the great Holland, all these have their places in different parts of my garden.
Parkinson tells us how at Longleete in his time people said that a rose tree then bore white roses on one side, and red on the other; but the old writer looked upon this as a fable, and declared, “This may be as true as the old story that a white hen visited Livia Augusta with a sprig of bays, and foretold, Augusta believed, by so doing empire to Augusta’s posterity, and extinction to the race when the brood of the hen failed.” Be this as it may, I have a standard rose with a Gloire de Dijon and a General Jacqueminot budded on the same tree. Burbidge was much pleased with the combination of colours and called it Christian and Heathen—names, I fancy, first bestowed by his old wife Hester.
THE GREY MARE AND ROSEMARY