"The box tree is a green shrub of greatest use and one of the most necessary in the garden. There are two sorts, the dwarf box which we French call Buis A' Artous much used for planting the embroidery of Parterres. It naturally does not grow very much which makes it called dwarf box. The other kind is the Box Tree of the woods, which advances much higher and has bigger leaves which make it fit to form Pallisades and green Tufts for Garnishing. It comes up in the shade but is a long time gaining any considerable height. It is put to a great many petty uses, as making balls—as the climate of France is very different from that of the Indies in the degree heat it is better to raise from slips and layers than to try to sow seed which is a great time coming up."
The book quite frankly disclosed the terrors as well as the joys of the game. It was most disconcerting to read of
"The Distempers and Insects that Attack….The great Enemies are
Rabbets, Garden Mise, Moles, Caterpillars, Maybugs, Ants, Snails,
Turks, Canthardies and an abundance of weeds, the names of which are
unknown to us—"
She shouted with youthful laughter as she read it, the echoes of her merriment sounding through the empty halls. She doubled her little fist and shook it toward the candle, flickering low in its socket.
"That's what has hidden the garden," she murmured, "that's why I can't see it—" she wrinkled her nose in disgust. "—Abundance-of-weeds— Piqueur and Bele will settle you!"
All through the verdant spring, all through the quick hot summer the girl puzzled over the unanswered riddle—the scheme of the garden. Piqueur and Bele and Margot toiled valiantly pulling up the myriad abundance-of-weeds, but in vain. It was not until the resplendent autumn had passed that she had any inkling of the real pattern. There came a glorious moonlit night, a chilly night when she snuggled under the blankets and yawned over the chapter that told her "how to mulch plants for winter." The wind blew so chill that at midnight she pattered across the old carpet to make the casement fast. The whole cleared space below her glistened with the fairy glamour of the first frost. Under the magic silvery whiteness the lost "parterres and cabinets and lozenges" with their paths and borders stood out as clearly in the moonlight as the day when Madame Prudence's workmen had charted them there. She laughed aloud as she ran back and turned to the map labelled "The twentieth and laft practife which is the most superb and which is The Bifected Oval."
"Oh, Oh!" she murmured as she leaned across the stone sill, unmindful of the cold, to blow a tiny kiss to the fountain cupid, "How stupid I was not to see! You just live in half the oval and the kitchen garden and the stables are the other half—"
She could scarcely wait for morning to impart her wonderful news to
Grandy and the others.
"Some say it can be done within five years, but ye author believes from experiences both at Versailles and in ye south of England that a decade or more is necessary to establish any garden—"
Which warning from the fat brown leather book made it easier for Felice, you see, because she never hoped to accomplish the garden in a little time. Besides, Piqueur was, as Octavia had foretold "too old." But it was Margot—oh, heaven-sent Margot, and the adoring, clumsy Bele who toiled like four men, and so cabinet by cabinet, parterre by parterre, terrace by terrace, the superb old garden began to grow lovely once more.