er, and the walls are covered with virginia creeper. There
is a little verandah in the middle, leading by a flight of rickety
wooden steps down into what seems to have been the only spot in the
whole place that was ever cared for. This is a semicircle cut into the
lawn and edged with privet, and in this semicircle are eleven beds of
different sizes bordered with box and arranged round a sun-dial, and the
sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by me.
These beds were the only sign of any attempt at gardening to be seen
(except a solitary crocus that came up all by itself each spring in the
grass, not because it wanted to, but because it could not help it), and
these I had sown with ipomaea, the whole eleven, having found a German
gardening book, according to which ipomaea in vast quantities was the
one thing needful to turn the most hideous desert into a paradise.
Nothing else in that book was recommended with anything like the same
warmth, and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of seed necessary, I
bought ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in the eleven beds
but round nearly every tree, and then waited in great agitation for the
promised paradise to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.

Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweetpeas which made me very
happy all the summer, and then there were some sunflowers and a few
hollyhocks under the south windows, with Madonna lilies in between. But
the lilies, after being transplanted, disappeared to my great dismay,
for how was I to know it was the way of lilies? And the hollyhocks
turned out to be rather ugly colours, so that my first summer was
decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas. At present we are only
just beginning to breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and
borders and paths made in time for this summer. The eleven beds round
the sun-dial are filled with roses, but I see already that I have
made mistakes with some. As I have not a living soul with whom to hold
communion on this or indeed on any matter, my only way of learning is
by making mistakes. All eleven were to have been carpeted with purple
pansies, but finding that I had not enough and that nobody had any to
sell me, only six have got their pansies, the others being sown with
dwarf mignonette. Two of the eleven are filled with Marie van Houtte
roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with Laurette Messimy, one
with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one