I 12 
THE HEART OF A GARDEN 
received its warning. To be sure, in the country the 
signals of decay are hardly manifest, for here the 
seasons come belated, and winter makes a tardier 
approach than in the town. Leaves are not yet dis¬ 
coloured, although the heavier gloom of the great elms 
forebodes the year’s mourning, and the hedgerows are 
still fresh to the eye, studded with red rose berries and 
hung with green garlands of that Maenad of the wild, 
the vine-like briony. 
Here in my rose-garden does hope still inhabit, and 
most conspicuously abundant of all are the Noisettes. 
William Allen Richardson is regally generous with his 
tapestries of cloth of gold; Aimee Vibert showers her 
store of fragrant milk-white blossoms abroad in liberal 
largesse; the pretty Boule de Neige has forgotten her 
whimsies and is fully bedecked with virginal cups of 
snow. But the Marechal Niel is sparing, almost 
niggardly, of his lovely lemon-coloured blooms; you 
would almost think he feared to lose in dignity by a too 
great familiarity of habit. L’Ideal, strangest of Nois¬ 
ettes, shows a wealth of lustrous copper-tinted buds 
whose somewhat metallic hues are apt to provoke in me 
sentiments of surprise rather than affection. It is odd, 
it is un-rose-like, and I harbour it mainly out of friend¬ 
liness for Araminta, whose garden-ground does not 
favour the growth of roses. So many folk have taken 
it for artificial, she tells me, when adorning her hair or 
her bosom, that it has completely won her heart, 
although it shares, with others of its kindred Teas, the 
common fault of ineffectiveness when fully blown. 
They are all in the same tale. Perle des Jardins, 
