Close to the road, where the fence angle allows for a deep bed and the lilacs grade from the tall white of the height of trees down to the compact bushes of newer French varieties, lies the violet bed, now a mass of green leaves only, but by these Aunt Lavinia's eye read them out and found here the English sweet wild violet, as well as the deep purple double garden variety, the tiny white scented that comes with pussy-willows, the great single pansy violet of California, and the violets grown from the Russian steppes that carpeted the ground under your "mother tree."
From this bed the lilies-of-the-valley start and follow the entire length of the front fence, as you preach on the sunny side, the fence itself being hidden by a drapery of straw-coloured and pink Chinese honeysuckle that we called at home June honeysuckle, though this is covered with flower sprays in late August, and must be therefore a sort of monthly-minded hybrid, after the fashion of the hybrid tea-rose.
If I were to tell of the tea-roses grown here, they would fill a chronicle by itself, though only a few of the older kinds, such as safrano, bon silene, and perle, are favourites. Mrs. Puffin says that some of them, the great shrubs, are wintered out-of-doors, and others are lifted, like the lemon balms, and kept in the dry, light cellar in tubs.
But oh! Mrs. Evan, you must go and see Mrs. Marchant's lilies! They are growing as freely as weeds among the uncut grass, and blooming as profusely as the bell-lilies in Opal Farm meadows! And all the spring bulbs are also grown in this grass that lies between the shorn grass paths, and in autumn when the tops are dead and gone it is carefully burned over and the turf is all the winter covering they have.
Does the grass look ragged and unsightly? No, because I think that it is cut lightly with a scythe after the spring bulbs are gone and that the patient woman, whose life the garden is, keeps the tallest seeded grasses hand trimmed from between the lily stalks!
Ah, but how that garden lingers with me, and the single glimpse I caught of the deep dark eyes of its mistress as they looked out of a vine-clad window toward the sky!
I have made a list of the plants that are possible for my own permanent bed of fragrant flowers and leaves, that I may enjoy them, and that the Infant may have fragrant memories to surround all her youth and bind her still more closely to the things of outdoor life.
I chanced upon a verse of Bourdillon's the other day. Do you know it?