with Adam and Devoniensis, two with
Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial with
three sorts of red roses (seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt
Scarlet, and Prefet de Limburg. This bed is, I am sure, a mistake, and
several of the others are, I think, but of course I must wait and see,
being such an ignorant person. Then I have had two long beds made in the
grass on either side of the semicircle, each sown with mignonette, and
one filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other with Jules Finger and
the Bride; and in a warm corner under the drawing-room windows is a
bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, and Comtesse Riza du Parc;
while farther down the garden, sheltered on the north and west by a
group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, containing Rubens,
Madame Joseph Schwartz, and the Hen. Edith Gifford. All these roses are
dwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden, two Madame George
Bruants, and they look like broomsticks. How I long for the day when
the tea-roses open their buds! Never did I look forward so intensely to
anything; and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little
things have achieved in the twenty-four hours in the way of new leaf or
increase of lovely red shoot.

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south
windows in a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of
which I have sown two long borders of sweetpeas facing the rose beds, so
that my roses may have something almost as sweet as themselves to
look at until the autumn, when everything is to make place for more
tea-roses. The path leading away from this semicircle down the garden is
bordered with China roses, white and pink, with here and there a Persian
Yellow. I wish now I had put tea-roses there, and I have misgivings as
to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas, for the Chinas
are such wee little baby things, and the Persian Yellows look as though
they intended to be big bushes.

There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the
least understand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the
flowering of these roses, and not a German gardening book that does not
relegate all tea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and
depriving them for ever of the breath of God. It was no doubt because I
was so ignorant that I rushed in where Teutonic angels fear to tread and
made my tea-roses face a n