She adored every inch of her domain, she could scarcely wait for the ankle to heal so that she could rove about the overgrown paths in the woods and tumbled walks and weed-covered lawns. She could not get up early enough in the morning to do all her eager young heart longed to do. Rebuilding the garden was a sacred trust; hadn't Maman told her to do it? All day long, her serious face shaded by the old garden hat, her slender hands encased in the gauntleted gloves, she prowled about the terraces or rummaged in the tool house, usually with the beloved THEORY AND PRACTISE OF GARDENING under her arm. Sometimes she spread it open on a dilapidated bench so that she could read its solemn dissertations. The very title page appalled one with the gravity of the task. In flourishing type it boasted of its august contents—
Wherein Is fully handled
all that relates to the fine gardens
commonly called pleasure gardens
as Parterres, Groves, Bowling Greens.
Containing
Divers plans and general dispositions.
Methods of planting, and raising in little time,
all the plants requisite in a garden.
Done from the French original in Paris
anno domini 1709
Daytime was not long enough for its perusal. Night after night, she sat hunched up in the Poquelin bed and pored over her beloved book. Sometimes after she read she would run and peer out from her casement window in the moonlight and scowl over the wilderness that lay below her, the wilderness that had once been a garden. The cleared space that stretched for two or three hundred yards before the house was divided into three flat terraces whose crumbling banks had lost their once careful outlines; and at the bottom of the lowest terrace a tottering lattice, sagging with old vines, made a background for the fountain in whose rubbish-filled depths a chubby cupid struggled patiently with an impossible marble duck.
"If I could only see how it went—" she would fret, "I can't see which one of them it is."
For in the back of the Garden book were many folded charts and maps, so big that they stretched out enormously over the counterpane of the bed. Sometimes Felicia thought that Mistress Prudence' garden must have been built after "The Sixteenth Practise"—that was a brave plan "with three terraces and a fountain at the base," but sometimes she thought it must be after the "single star cut into cabinets."
At first she contented herself with gardening in the Bowling Green with Piqueur feebly turning over the weedy sod and Bele tramping to and fro with barrows of manure. Her Bowling Green was in the very center of the second terrace. She had discovered that directly she began.
"In France," she read, "a bowling green differs from what you call a bowling green in England. We mean no other by this word than certain hollow sinking and slopes of turf which are practised in the middle of a parterre. A Bowling Green is the most agreeable compartment of a garden, when rightly placed most pleasant to the eye beside the pleasure it affords us of lying on its sloping banks in the shade during hottest weather."
Only it wasn't so easy to read as it looks now we're writing it over. For "The Theory and Practise of Gardening" made you rub your eyes and groan, it was such a puzzling sort of book. To begin with its type was bewildering with its s's all turned like f's and its italics so thin you could scarcely decipher them. Besides that, the author, who remained discreetly anonymous, but none the less unwarrantably conceited, had a maddening way of spreading over a whole page the way not to do things—he didn't state at the start that it was the wrong way he was relating, he just meandered on, letting the reader suppose that was the rightest way possible as he wrote at length pertaining to:
"How to grow Box Trees from seed.