96 A GARDEN OF PLEASURE 



will stock a garden ! Once we had the 

 pink Riviera cistus of the large grey-green 

 leaves and exquisite flowers which light up 

 the hills and dusty roadsides like rose- 

 coloured lamps alive in broad daylight ! 

 Our plants perished in some unusually 

 severe frost. The white cistus, with 

 narrower, more polished, aromatic foliage,, 

 is hardier, and seems quite happy here 

 in a south aspect. We have but one 

 old Gum Cistus, as fragile, and more 

 wondrously beautiful than all the rest. 

 How the folds and crumples in the satin of 

 her ample petal do but enhance her beauty 1 

 It grows on the lawn at the foot of a 

 Noisette rose that now envelopes the bare 

 stem of a dead weeping ash. The rose 

 climbed up to the top of the tree, and falls- 

 over in a great luxuriance of flower and 

 leaf and thorn. Within the thorniest heart 

 of this thorny rose-thicket a thrush has her 

 nest. I think, in her wisdom, she this time 

 made it just a little too safe. The young 

 thrushes still sit full fledged in the nest; I 

 think they dare not tempt the thorns. 

 As we pass through the south porch the 



