The Garden 



myself to those that are necessary to explain the present 

 condition of the ground. 



The most evident signs of gardening date from the 

 earliest years of the nineteenth century, when the place 

 belonged to my great-grandmother, the last of the 

 Garnaults, for on her marriage in 1799 the pleasant old 

 French name was changed for the unromantic-sounding 

 patronymic which I think must be the longest mono- 

 syllable in the English language, and unless carefully spelt 

 as well as pronounced in shops and stores suffers strange 

 vagaries in form, some of them exceedingly unpleasing to 

 the polite eye. This Ann Garnault has left her mark on 

 the garden by planting a deciduous Cypress (Taxodium 

 distichum}, which, in spite of a subsequent draining of the 

 pond by which it was planted, has grown into a really 

 fine tree. 



In one favourable season it matured a few cones, but 

 the catkins seldom get a fair chance of full development. 

 They are formed in the autumn, and remain green when 

 the foliage turns to that deep red so characteristic of this 

 tree the red of a fox's coat, or of Devon cattle. They 

 remain on the tree after the falling of the leaves has covered 

 the beds with an apparent mulch of cocoanut fibre, but 

 severe winters bring many of them down, and even the 

 few tassels of male catkins left generally fail to effect 

 perfect fertilisation of the queer little solitary female 

 blossoms for lack of dry sunny days with mild breezes 

 in early Spring. The good example of Great-grand- 

 mother Ann has been followed by the two succeeding 

 generations, but the younger Cypresses are of course 

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