lled by gay
patches of verbenas of every hue and shade. The sweet-scented verbena
is one of the commonest and most successful shrubs in a Natal garden,
and just now the large bushes of it which one sees in every direction
are covered by tapering spikes of its tiny white blossoms. But the
feature of this garden was roses--roses on each side whichever way you
turned, and I should think of at least a hundred different sorts.
Not the stiff standard rose tree of an English garden, with its few
precious blossoms, to be looked at from a distance and admired with
respectful gravity. No: in this garden the roses grow as they might
have grown in Eden--untrained, unpruned, in enormous bushes covered
entirely by magnificent blossoms, each bloom of which would have won
a prize at a rose-show. There was one cloth-of-gold rose bush that
I shall never forget--its size, its fragrance, its wealth of
creamy-yellowish blossoms. A few yards off stood a still bigger and
more luxuriant pyramid, some ten feet high, covered with the large,
delicate and regular pink bloom of the souvenir de Malmaison. When I
talk of _a_ bush I only mean one especial bush which caught my eye. I
suppose there were fifty cloth-of-gold and fifty souvenir rose bushes
in that garden. Red roses, white roses, tea roses, blush-roses, moss
roses, and, last not least, the dear old-fashioned, homely cabbage
rose, sweetest and most sturdy of all. You could wander for acres and
acres among fruit trees and plantations of oaks and willows and
other trees, but you never got away from the roses. There they were,
beautiful, delicious things at every turn--hedges of them, screens of
them and giant bushes of them on either hand. As I have said before,
though kept free from weeds by some half dozen scantily-clad but
stalwart Kafirs with their awkward hoes, it was not a bit like a trim
English garden. It was like a garden in which Lalla Rookh might have
wandered by moonlight talking sentimental philosophy with her minstrel
prince under old Fadladeen's chaperonage, or a garden that Boccaccio
might have peopled with his Arcadian fine ladies and gentlemen. It was
emphatically a poet's or a painter's garden, not a gardener's garden.
Then, as though nothing should be wanting to make the scene lovely,
one could hear through the fragrant silence the tinkling of the little
"spruit" or brook at the bottom of the garden, and the sweet song of
the Cape canary, the same sort of greenish finch whic