For the most part, they were the favorites of a generation gone: Banksias, festooning the warm bricks with bouquets of amber yellow and of violet-tinged white; Baltimore Belles, creamy-hued and graceful; rosy-violet Pride of Washingtons; sweetbriers of scarlet and blush; Austrian briers, single blossoms of flame-yellow. In the beds were great cabbage-roses of delicate, clear pink and of deep rose; moss-roses of many sorts, crimson Damasks, bright-red Luxembourgs, tiny clusters of flesh-colored Pompons. An immense bush of Gloire des Jardins was aflame with its great double blooms of red, while clustered about it were Madame Cottins, Philippe Quatres, Marceaus, Madame Hardys, Princess Clementines, and Madame Plantiers. The rich crimson, cup-shaped blossoms of a George the Fourth were nodding regally over the yellow-pink blooms of an Emmeline; the brown velvet petals of a Lord Nelson were clustering above a lowly Wellington; while, supreme in one three-cornered jungle of color, a spreading bush of Queen Victoria, an offshoot of the parent stem, showered the ground with its glowing petals.
Above the farther wall leaned a magnolia, a portly, eminently respectable magnolia, spreading its long branches far out over the garden as though offering old-gentlemanly protection to the rose-ladies. In the long afternoons the green and bronze foliage, now reflecting the morning sunlight from its varnished surface, made a pleasant gloom thereabouts, throwing great gently-moving ovals of greenish shadow over the rosebushes along the old wall; here was the Giant of Battles, with petals so darkly red as to verge upon black, and the Duchess, with old-fashioned blooms, globular, chary of petals, showing yellow at the heart when fully opened to the sun, and of a rare old shade of pink that made one think of lavender-scented brocades and was like the inner surface of a sea-shell.
Many a rose bloomed there whose name was no longer known, whose origin was forgotten with its grower, but which, nameless and unpretentious, leafed and budded and flowered season after season, year after year, gladly and humbly fulfilling its mission and setting an example which many of the far-heralded and perverse beauties of the garden might well have emulated.
In one corner dwelt a foreign colony of hardy phlox, white, scarlet, and crimson, tall and vigorous as they needs must be in order to reach the sunlight above the great rose-bushes and to maintain their hard-won footing. And here and there, aliens too, yuccas shot their great spikes above the wilderness of bloom and swung their panicles of cream-colored bells, whose tinkling the birds and bees alone might hear, in the languorous morning breeze. Fallen petals splashed the level tops of the box hedges with brilliant colors, and, when a vagrant wind set the blooms a-nodding, fluttered to the gravel paths and so drifted like scented, tinted snowflakes to and fro. In the shadowed corners of the hedge closely woven spider webs were jewelled with dew-drops and, when the moving leaves let the sun-flecks through, gleamed and sparkled like silver filaments hung with diamonds and blue pearls.
