SIX GARDENING VIRTUES

When we first began to own a garden we could not bring ourselves to wait in patience for developments. We expected our beds to bloom as by magic. We vehemently ordered pot-plants because no seedlings could be expected to “do anything” in June; and the disproportion between our bills and the result filled us with dismay. But a garden is at once the most delightful and cunning of teachers. How kindly are the virtues it inculcates!—Patience, faith, hope, tenderness, gratitude, resignation, things in themselves as fragrant and beautiful as the flowers, or like the herbs, a little repellent of aspect, but sweet in their bruised savour.

Now we have even been taught to take pleasure and comfort from the vision of the beds in their winter preparation, where with the believer’s eye, we anticipate the fulfilment of the spring. In the little Dutch Garden under the new wing, the two long beds between the clipped Bilberry hedges are full of compact cushions of Forget-me-not. Through these the green noses of the china-blue Hyacinths, that are to make lakes of colour and scent at the end of March, are beginning to push upwards.

The winter has been very mild.—Another garden lesson: too much spoiling in infancy is bound to produce forwardness in the young, and the inevitable result of withering snubs!

When the Hyacinths have faded, the Forget-me-nots will have spread a sheet of tender beauty over the unsightliness. Did we mention that a garden teaches charity? And between this flying scud of blue foam the Darwin Tulips will have already reared bold green snake heads which will gradually become invaded by tints of mauve, rose, dark purple, until the day when their glorious chalices will open, as if cut out of living jewels, translucent to the light.

The Dutch Garden is bounded by a clipped yew hedge on two sides, divided by a rustic archway where Pink Dorothy rambles in June and onwards. Against this hedge there are two long beds lying to the south, filled with crimson and red roses: in spring edged with Darwins and Arabis, before Mme. Normand Levavasseur spreads her disappointing maroon clusters. On the north side the brick wall of the terrace, divided in its turn opposite the archway by brick steps, is flanked by Darwin tulip beds. The beds under the side of the house to the west have also Darwins with a carpet of Forget-me-nots and a fringe of Arabis. The space that runs back to the outer wall under the study windows is planted with Gloire de Versailles, Pyrus Japonica and the ubiquitous Tulips and Forget-me-nots.

There is one thing we have succeeded in impressing on the patient and kindly Adam, and that is that we “cannot bear bald spaces.” Our bulbs lie as close as they can without injuring each other. Our Wallflowers, even now, in January, jostle!

In the bed that runs right along the bricked upper terrace, there lie, awaiting the call of the different months please add docility and punctuality to the moral list, behind a deep border of Mrs. Sinkins, a double row of Crocuses, a row of Thomas More Tulips, a little hedge of white and red “Polyantha” Roses, and groups of “Candidum” Lilies. At intervals, on the top of the terrace wall, are large Compton vases which will foam with Forget-me-Nots, and thrust clusters of Hyacinths up against the Moor by and by. Just now they carry little yellow torches of Retinospora Aurea, which Adam said, when he first planted them, looked, he thought, “very lonely,” but which, each rising from a field of green moss, stand out, we think, with a classic dignity against the sombre magnificence of those rolling winter hills.