My Garden in Spring 



which carry on the generosity of the world, while the 

 great waxen snow-cup and stars of Hellebore are begin- 

 ning to think of the autumn, and keep the copse in loveli- 

 ness until everywhere the Winter Cyclamen light up their 

 little lamps of incandescent carbuncle. So is the wheel 

 of nature followed in a good garden, and loveliness brought 

 to birth from day to day, as no money and no loveless or 

 ignorant desire for display could ever breed it. And how 

 different here is the apparently effortless compilation of 

 nature's best wealth from the " display " (admirable word) 

 of those gardens that are always yelling of the number of 

 bedded plants they contain. There was once a man who 

 stood upon the Mont Cenis when all the earth was indeed 

 a burning deck of blossom, filmed into the uttermost dis- 

 tances with the gold and violet veils of the Pansies, and 

 with the flanks of the great mountains snow-flaked with 

 Anemone alpina; he stood with one boot on a foot- wide 

 patch of Gentiana verna, and the other trampling a blossom- 

 hidden carpet of Dryas, and he looked round with that 

 scorn-corrugated nose of which I lately spoke, and he 

 bitterly observed, " I don't think much of this for a dis- 

 play." Only such wealthy-minded persons, I am sure, 

 could have such a feeling about any garden so real as 

 this of Mr. Bowles, where nature's poor little efforts are 

 so watched and followed, and nature's wide carpet of blue 

 and saffron and gold and rose and violet rewoven in 

 a tissue of loveliness, how different from the neatly- 

 partitioned unhappiness of Alpines bought by the hun- 

 dred and bedded out for show. It is from such a garden 

 as this that one comes away both humbled and consoled 

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