the life of the plant when the strength of the present bush comes to an 

 end. 



Such a garden, full of so keen a personal interest, sets one thinking. 

 What will become of it fifty or a hundred years hence ? The flowers, 

 with due diligence of division, and replanting and enriching of the soil, 

 will live for ever. The name-plates, with care and protection from 

 breakage, will also live. But what will these names be one or two 

 generations hence ? Will the plants all be there ? And what of the 

 Friendships ? They are something belonging intimately to the lives of 

 those now living. What record of them will endure ; or enduring, be 

 of use or comfort to those who come after ? 



Then one thinks and wonders — what hand, perhaps quite a humble 

 one — planted the old apple-tree that has its stem now girdled by a rustic 

 seat. Its days are perhaps already numbered ; the top is thin and open, 

 the foliage is spare ; it seems to be beyond fruit-bearing age, and as if it 

 had scarcely strength to draw up the circulating sap. 



And then, for all the carefulness given to the making of the garden 

 and its tender memories of human kindness in giving and receiving, the 

 plant that dominates the whole, and gives evidence of the oldest 

 occupation from times past, and promises the greatest attainment of age 

 in days to come, is the Ivy on the old Stone Hall. Probably it was 

 never planted at all — came by itself, as we carelessly say — or planted, as 

 we may more thoughtfully and worthily say, by the hand of God, and 

 now doing its part of sheltering and fostering the Garden of Friendship. 

 Should not the Ivy also have its heart-shaped plate and its most grateful 

 and reverent inscription, as a noble plant, the gift of the kindest Friend 

 of all, who first created a garden for the sustenance and delight of man and 

 put into his heart that love of beautiful flowers that has always endured 

 as one of the chiefest and quite the purest of his human pleasures ? 



There is a rose-garden beyond the bank of shrubs to the left, where 

 each Rose, on one of the permanent labels, here shaped after the pattern 

 of a Tudor Rose, has a quotation from the poets. Here are, among 

 others, the older roses of our gardens, the Damask and the Rose of 

 Provence, the Cinnamon and the Musk Rose, the bushy Briers and the 

 taller Eglantine that we now call Sweetbrier, 



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