VERNON LEE 295 



DOCCACCIO and the Italians more usually employ the word 'VERNON 

 *-* orfoj which has lost its Latin signification, and is a place, LEE -' 

 as we learn from the context, planted with fruit-trees and 

 with pot-herbs. . . . But although in this story (of Madonna 

 Dianora) Boccaccio employs the word giardino, instead of orto, 

 I think we must imagine that magic flower garden rather as 

 a corner they still exist on every hillside of orchard con- 

 nected with the fields of wheat and olives below by the long 

 tunnels of vine trellis, and dying away into them with the 

 great tufts of lavender and rosemary and fennel on the grassy 

 bank under the cherry trees. This piece of terraced ground 

 along which the water spurted from the dolphin's mouth or 

 the sirens' breasts runs through walled channels, refreshing 

 impartially violets and salads, lilies and tall flowering onions, 

 under the branches of the peach tree and the pomegranate, to 

 where in the shade of the great pink oleander tufts, it pours out 

 below into the big tank, for the maids to rinse their linen in 

 the evening, and the peasants to fill their cans to water the 

 bedded-out tomatoes and the potted clove-pinks in the shadow 

 of the house. . . . 



Now this poverty of flower-beds and richness of pots made 

 it easy and natural for the Italian garden to become, like the 

 Moorish one, a place of mere greenery and water, a palace 

 whose fountains plashed in sunny yards walled in with myrtle 

 and bay, in mysterious chambers roofed over with ilex and box. 

 And this it became. Moderately at first ; a few hedges of box 

 and cypress exhaling its resinous breath in the sunshine 

 leading up to the long, flat, Tuscan house, with its tower or 

 pillared loggia under the roof to take the air and dry linen ; a 

 few quaintly cut trees set here and there, along with the twisted 

 mulberry tree where the family drank its wine and ate its fruit of 

 an evening ; a little grove of ilexes to the back, in whose shade 

 you could sleep, while the cicalas buzzed at noon; some cypresses 

 gathered together into a screen, just to separate the garden from 

 the olive yard above \ gradually perhaps a balustrade set at the 

 end of the bowling-green, that you might see, even from a distance, 



