Elizabeth and Her German Garden

May 10th.—­I knew nothing whatever last year about gardening and this year know very little more, but I have dawnings of what may be done, and have at least made one great stride—­ from ipomaea to tea-roses.

The garden was an absolute wilderness.  It is all round the house, but the principal part is on the south side and has evidently always been so.  The south front is one-storied, a long series of rooms opening one into the other, and the walls are covered with virginia creeper.  There is a little verandah in the middle, leading by a flight of rickety wooden steps down into what seems to have been the only spot in the whole place that was ever cared for.  This is a semicircle cut into the lawn and edged with privet, and in this semicircle are eleven beds of different sizes bordered with box and arranged round a sun-dial, and the sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by me.  These beds were the only sign of any attempt at gardening to be seen (except a solitary crocus that came up all by itself each spring in the grass, not because it wanted to, but because it could not help it), and these I had sown with ipomaea, the whole eleven, having found a German gardening book, according to which ipomaea in vast quantities was the one thing needful to turn the most hideous desert into a paradise.  Nothing else in that book was recommended with anything like the same warmth, and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of seed necessary, I bought ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in the eleven beds but round nearly every tree, and then waited in great agitation for the promised paradise to appear.  It did not, and I learned my first lesson.

Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweetpeas which made me very happy all the summer, and then there were some sunflowers and a few hollyhocks under the south windows, with Madonna lilies in between.  But the lilies, after being transplanted, disappeared to my great dismay, for how was I to know it was the way of lilies?  And the hollyhocks turned out to be rather ugly colours, so that my first summer was decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas.  At present we are only just beginning to breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and borders and paths made in time for this summer.  The eleven beds round the sun-dial are filled with roses, but I see already that I have made mistakes with some.  As I have not a living soul with whom to hold communion on this or indeed on any matter, my only way of learning is by making mistakes.  All eleven were to have been carpeted with purple pansies, but finding that I had not enough and that nobody had any to sell me, only six have got their pansies, the others being sown with dwarf mignonette.  Two of the eleven are filled with Marie van Houtte roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with Laurette Messimy, one with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one with Adam and Devoniensis, two with Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial with three sorts of red roses (seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt Scarlet, and Prefet de Limburg.  This bed is, I am sure, a mistake, and several of the others are, I think, but of course I must wait and see, being such an ignorant person.  Then I have had two long beds made in the grass on either side of the semicircle, each sown with mignonette, and one filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other with Jules Finger and the Bride; and in a warm corner under the drawing-room windows is a bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, and Comtesse Riza du Parc; while farther down the garden, sheltered on the north and west by a group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, containing Rubens, Madame Joseph Schwartz, and the Hen.  Edith Gifford.  All these roses are dwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden, two Madame George Bruants, and they look like broomsticks.  How I long for the day when the tea-roses open their buds!  Never did I look forward so intensely to anything; and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little things have achieved in the twentyfour hours in the way of new leaf or increase of lovely red shoot.

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south windows in a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of which I have sown two long borders of sweetpeas facing the rose beds, so that my roses may have something almost as sweet as themselves to look at until the autumn, when everything is to make place for more tea-roses.  The path leading away from this semicircle down the garden is bordered with China roses, white and pink, with here and there a Persian Yellow.  I wish now I had put tea-roses there, and I have misgivings as to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas, for the Chinas are such wee little baby things, and the Persian Yellows look as though they intended to be big bushes.

There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the least understand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the flowering of these roses, and not a German gardening book that does not relegate all tea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and depriving them for ever of the breath of God.  It was no doubt because I was so ignorant that I rushed in where Teutonic angels fear to tread and made my tea-roses face a northern winter; but they did face it under fir branches and leaves, and not one has suffered, and they are looking to-day as happy and as determined to enjoy themselves as any roses, I am sure, in Europe.