eenhouse for the winter, and hope the Bouquet d'Or, in a sunny
place near the glass, may be induced to open some of those buds. The
greenhouse is only used as a refuge, and kept at a temperature just
above freezing, and is reserved entirely for such plants as cannot stand
the very coldest part of the winter out of doors. I don't use it for
growing anything, because I don't love things that will only bear the
garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and
petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy
creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in
and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty,
either in plants or women. No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be
had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are
fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God's wholesome
air and are blessed in return with a far greater intensity of scent and
colour.

We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order
and planting the new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next summer
with more hope than ever in spite of my many failures. I wish the years
would pass quickly that will bring my garden to perfection! The Persian
Yellows have gone into their new quarters, and their place is occupied
by the tearose Safrano; all the rose beds are carpeted with pansies sown
in July and transplanted in October, each bed having a separate colour.
The purple ones are the most charming and go well with every rose, but I
have white ones with Laurette Messimy, and yellow ones with Safrano, and
a new red sort in the big centre bed of red roses. Round the semicircle
on the south side of the little privet hedge two rows of annual
larkspurs in all their delicate shades have been sown, and just beyond
the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semicircle of standard tea and pillar
roses.

In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with larkspurs,
annual and perennial, columbines, giant poppies, pinks, Madonna
lilies, wallflowers, hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies, lavender,
starworts, cornflowers, Lychnis chalcedonica, and bulbs packed in
wherever bulbs could go. These are the borders that were so hardly used
by the other gardener. The spring boxes for the verandah steps have been
filled with pink and white and yellow tulips. I love tulips better than
any other spring flower; they are the embodiment