There is one spot in the Flower-Patch that is loved by grown-ups as well as birds. It is the little grotto that is just outside the cottage back-door. It has made itself by making the best of circumstances. Can I describe it so that you will see it, I wonder?

First there comes a narrow garden bed, full of old-fashioned flowers—Bee-balm, Jacob’s Ladder, and Solomon’s Seal; then a rough stone wall about two feet high keeps the earth above from tumbling down on to the narrow bed below. The whole of the garden being on a steeply sloping hillside, the earth has to be propped up at intervals by these lovely little ranks of natural rockery, planted by Nature with hart’s-tongue and a variety of other little ferns, with mother-of-millions and creeping ivy, with stone-crop and house-leeks. How do the things get there? How do they plant themselves? Isn’t it marvellous this unending gardening of Nature!

On a level with the top of the low wall is another garden bed. You see the ground is rising, rising up to the clouds all the time at the back of the cottage, just as it is falling, falling down to the river in the valley all the time in front of the cottage. This next terrace bed loses itself entirely in a miniature wild wood and drops down into a tiny dell, just big enough for a couple of small children to give a tea-party to the fairies in.

Here it is that the beauty of the whole place seems to climax. The other side of the dell is bounded by a large grey boulder, about six feet high, flanked by a few smaller ones tumbling about at various angles. The stone was too big for the original gardener to move, so he wisely left it where it was. They often do that on these hills. I know one cottage that has a most substantial stone table in the centre of the kitchen. It is just a huge stone that was too big to move by ordinary methods when they erected the cottage, and so they simply left it, and built the kitchen round it.

But my boulder in the grotto is not so much for use as for beauty. True, it supports a plum tree that springs up from behind it, just outside the orchard rails. But the way Nature has festooned that rock is worth going a long way to study. From the ground at one side springs a wild rose with stout stems that grow fairly straight and erect, considering it is a wild rose, and this sends out long curved and arched sprays, dotted with pink blossoms.

At the other side is a yellow jasmine, evidently a stray from the garden.

The stone itself is thickly covered with moss, small-leaved ivy (and isn’t small-leaved ivy lovely in its colouring very often, in the early months of the year, some brown and yellow, some red and green?) and little ferns, till scarcely a trace of the grey stone can be seen, and where it does push through it is splashed with milky-green lichen.

Then wandering over all is a wealth of honeysuckle that catches hold of everything impartially, and twines itself in all directions. At the base of the precipitous boulder the grass is thick and green; violets, the big purple-blue scented sort, cluster all around the corners, and hold up rich-looking blossoms; primroses laugh out in the sunshine; snowdrops dingle their bells to a delightful melody, if only our ears were more delicately tuned to catch the music; daffodils blow their own trumpets above their clumps of blue-green leaves; the ground-ivy creeps and creeps and lights up the green with its lovely blue flowers that have never received half the praise that is their due. And in a damp spot there is a mass of blue forget-me-nots, with one clump that is pure white.

Large ferns send up giant fronds to make cool shadows at one end. Tiny ferns busy themselves with the decoration of odd corners. A hazel bush reaches over and joins hands with the plum tree, to form a fitting roof to so lovely a dell; as I write—in February—it is a mass of fluttering catkins, and the plum tree is talking about shaking out a few flowers. But without these the place is already full of blossoms.

In a month or six weeks the old trees in the orchard behind will be like bouquets of pink and white blossoms.

You approach the grotto by a tiny path, about wide enough for a child; the entrance to the path is marked by a stunted old bush of lavender at one side, and a grey-green clump of sage at the other. They stand, with stems twisted and rugged like gnomes, guarding the entrance to the fairy’s playground; but if you rub them the right way they send up a lovely fragrance, and then you know you are admitted to the freedom of the enchanted spot.

It is so sheltered in this corner, and protected from the cold winds by the high hill behind, that even the ferns from last year are green and fresh-looking, you would think there had not been any winter here. And the brambles that clamber over the orchard rail—assuring the world at large that they are a highly respectable orchard-grown fruit tree, and not a wild weed—are still green and crimson and a rich purple with the lovely tints of last autumn.

The birds are fond of this grotto, and other wild things have found it out. Last summer, when the boulder seemed to be dripping with large juicy crimson honeysuckle berries, I watched a big bullfinch gorging to his heart’s content, his red waistcoat mingling well with the red of the berries. Mrs. Bullfinch was also there, in her less obtrusive grey and browny-black dress, and she had a couple of youngsters too. But do you think the father had any intention of sharing the delicacies? Not a bit of it! Every time his wife approached from the rear surreptitiously to snatch a berry, he turned round and drove her off (I really could have pardoned her if she had joined the suffragettes on the spot). She ranged her family along the orchard rail just above, and made various attempts to forage for them. But it was no use. So she took up her position beside the family on the rail and waited patiently, making plaintive sounds the while, till Mr. Bully had stuffed to repletion and flew away. I was glad there were a few hundred berries still left for the family. And didn’t they have a good time!

Just now the blue tits are very busy about the fruit trees, and a robin comes out from somewhere in the grotto at unexpected moments and stands motionless on a stone, with a bright eye cocked up inquiringly at the human intruder. I fancy he has chosen it for his summer residence.

A squirrel is very attached to this part of the garden. Sometimes one sees him, when the nuts are ripe, scurrying along the orchard rail in ever such a hurry, his chestnut-red tail bigger than himself. There are specially good nuts on that hazel-tree.

This morning I went out of the back-door, to find a large rabbit sitting and sunning himself at his ease among the snowdrops and violets in the little dell—within a yard of the door.

The weather has been like April to-day, brilliant sunshine and heavy showers. Suddenly the sky behind the cottage was lit up with a rainbow—a glorious span of colour that seemed to be resting on the hill-top. Then it dropped a bit lower at one end, and the big pine trees that stand higher up at the top of the orchard looked most majestic against it. Lower it seemed to drop, and then I distinctly saw the place where it touched the ground. You know they say there is a pot of gold buried at the end of the rainbow—where do you think that rainbow pointed? Why, straight at my fairy dell! So I know there is gold buried under that boulder, and that is why there is always sunshine peeping through the green; first it comes out in the yellow jasmine, then it flares in the daffodils, later you find it in the dancing buttercups and in the lovely honeysuckle, finally it waves to you a bright “Good-bye, Summer,” in the clump of golden-rod that is near the entrance.