and are
carved in endless variety. Now that the gardens have been so long
neglected or left in abeyance, the green staining has become perfect.
Though the stone-work is itself intact, it has all the picturesque
effect of the wear and ruin wrought by many centuries. I am having
it kept for you just as it is, except that I have had the weeds and
undergrowth cleared away so that its beauties might be visible.

But it is not merely the architect work of the garden that is so
beautiful, nor is the assembling there of the manifold wealth of
floral beauty--there is the beauty that Nature creates by the hand of
her servant, Time. You see, Aunt Janet, how the beautiful garden
inspires a danger-hardened old tramp like me to high-grade sentiments
of poetic fancy! Not only have limestone and sandstone, and even
marble, grown green in time, but even the shrubs planted and then
neglected have developed new kinds of beauty of their own. In some
far-distant time some master-gardener of the Vissarions has tried to
realize an idea--that of tiny plants that would grow just a little
higher than the flowers, so that the effect of an uneven floral
surface would be achieved without any hiding of anything in the
garden seen from anywhere. This is only my reading of what has been
from the effect of what is! In the long period of neglect the shrubs
have outlived the flowers. Nature has been doing her own work all
the time in enforcing the survival of the fittest. The shrubs have
grown and grown, and have overtopped flower and weed, according to
their inherent varieties of stature; to the effect that now you see
irregularly scattered through the garden quite a number--for it is a
big place--of vegetable products which from a landscape standpoint
have something of the general effect of statues without the cramping
feeling of detail. Whoever it was that laid out that part of the
garden or made the choice of items, must have taken pains to get
strange specimens, for all those taller shrubs are in special
colours, mostly yellow or white--white cypress, white holly, yellow
yew, grey-golden box, silver juniper, variegated maple, spiraea, and
numbers of dwarf shrubs whose names I don't know. I only know that
when the moon shines--and this, my dear Aunt Janet, is the very land
of moonlight itself!--they al