house with smoke coming out of chimney

How delightful it is to come back to our moors after London! Loki’s Grandmother’s heart always sinks when the bricks and mortar begin to spring up about the road, and the houses close in around her. Sometimes she thinks that what weighs upon it is the sense of all those miles of squalor; of all those hives of human misery; of all the sin and suffering. Perhaps, however, she is influenced by mere distaste of the crowd; displeasure in living one of a herd in a jostle of houses; the ignominy of being a number in a row with undesired neighbours on either side! Who would prefer to look on pavements, area railings and lamp-posts; to listen to the roar and turmoil of a life one has no ambition to share—a life vexing the peace of night and day, rather than feast the eyes on cool green loveliness, on rolling moorland; the ear on vast delicious silence or the choiring of windswept woods? How, in fact, can anyone who has the choice live in town, instead of in the fair, quiet, spacious country? One cannot feel one’s soul one’s own in London: bits of it are perpetually escaping to join the giddy midge dance. The individuality evaporates. But then—there are concerts, and Wagner’s operas; and one’s own select friends and the interest of the great intellectual movements! The splendid activities of life seem to pass one by in the country. Well, we suppose, like everything else in existence, one must take the see-saw as it comes, and accept the bumps for the sake of the soaring. But we are always glad to come back to Villino Loki.

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The discoveries one makes in the garden after ten days’ absence are thrilling. The three rows of Thomas More Tulips under the dining-room window are colouring to a glorious orange, and the Forget-me-nots planted between them are showing little sparks of blue. The tawny Wallflowers at the back are not all we could wish; but, even pinched as they are, the effect of their many velvet hues is satisfactory. There is a single row of double Tulips Prince of Orange at the edge of the bed, between the Forget-me-nots. In a week or so, looking up the terrace, there will be five lines of flame running gloriously out of the blue; a sight to delight the eye, against the curious bronze purple the moor wears just now.

The Scillas, which we thought were going to fail us, have been a tremendous success, and still form pools of glowing blue round the almond trees. Next year we intend to make a feature of Scillas. They are such tiny bulbs that they can scarcely interfere with anything; and we shall slip them in among the perennials in every corner, besides putting more in the grass terraces. We are also going to run riot with “Steeple-Jacks,” especially the light turquoise kind. They last an immense time and are of a delicious tint. The long border of Campanelle Jonquils that we have planted in what we call the “Bowling Green” are drawn up as for a review, stiff and straight like little soldiers in bright gold helmets. Next year we shall invest in three or four thousand Daffodils for the rough places under the trees, and we mean to star the banks with Primroses and Wild Violets.

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We have made a vast improvement these days by turfing most of the walks, and we now look out on a delicious sweep of green. The Lily Border and its opposite neighbour, the tongue of land with the Buddleia trees and shrubs, look infinitely more attractive thus set into the verdure. Great clumps of yellow Polyanthuses and self-sown Forget-me-nots make it gay while we are waiting for the Narcissus Poeticus, the Poppies, the Lilies and other joys to break upon us. The field of mixed Narcissus under the trees is going to be one sheet of blossom in a few days, blown about, though they be, poor darlings, by these fierce and cruel winds. The papers are full of exclamations over “winter in April”: so far our high-pitched garden has stood it well. This is the advantage, we suppose, of its natural backwardness.

We are now fired with the desire to turf the Dutch Garden; the path under the second terrace, i.e. Blue Border, and also the path leading from the Bowling Green, so that we shall look down on a succession of green levels, each with its wealth of flowers. We want to make the whole little place shine like a jewel out of the rough setting of the moor.

Talk of the zest of gambling! ’Tis impossible that it could more possess the soul in defiance of purse and prudence than the garden mania. If Loki’s Grandmother had hold of a cheque book which she hasn’t she is afraid the family substance would flow away from month to month into bulbs and blossoms, tubers and saxifrages, clumps and climbers; not to speak of such prosaic but necessary accompaniments as loam, manures, lawn-mixtures and “vaporisers.” She would build at least two new greenhouses and double her garden staff. And perhaps after all she wouldn’t be half as happy as she is. For she might be led into “named novelties,” and garden rivalries, and splendours of artificial rockeries where in the centre of vast beds of slag some microscopic curiosity no larger than a spider would spread a fairy claw in the shadow of a monstrous label. Perhaps she might be bitten with an unwholesome passion for Orchids, and spend the portion of her only child, and all the fur grandchildren, on the devilish attractions of those plants which are, we are convinced, flowers of evil.

Just now her last extravagance has been to order three and six worth of White Honesty at ninepence a dozen, to plant in among the new Rhododendrons; and she is suffused with satisfaction at the prospect of anything so cheap and charming. We recommend the effect, discovered quite accidentally.

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We have really abominable weather. It is very unusual.

is an aspiration justified as a rule by a tender interlude between the tantrums of March and the asperities of May. Last year April came in skipping like a kid on the Campagna, even its freakishness full of attraction. Is anything more charming than to see the kids playing among the flocks, as one drives along those roads of haunting and mysterious beauty—under that sky incomparable in its gem-like purity; to see the shepherd in his sheepskin seated on a fence with his legs cross-bandaged, the shrill pipe to his lips; to hear his wild strain and know that it was all just the same a thousand years ago and more? The kids, as they leap out of the scattered flocks, are cut against the blue as on some classic frieze; the tawny, melancholy plain falls and rises and falls again till the hills amethystine, snow-capped, close the field of vision in the far distance! The broken line of an aqueduct gleams as if golden.

Loki’s Grandmother believes she would give up her country and Villino Loki, and expatriate herself for ever gladly. But Italy is not expatriation, it is the home of the soul. Loki’s Grandpa says he quite admits all that—but that for a permanency he prefers his Surrey hills.

The fires on the Campagna are rose-carmine as the pointed flames pulsate upwards. Our fires here are only just the usual yellows. Where is it that Italy holds the secret? Is it in the translucence of the atmosphere? How the sunlight there lies on a common plaster wall! How the stone flushes! Just a little white Villino on a hill-side stands in a radiance of its own, and is not white at all but topaz coloured!

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To-day, the fifteenth of April, has been as grey and bleaching a day here as we never wish to meet again. Even the spears of the Narcissus are bruised and drooping.