Then at the back of the place comes the full chorus, and red flowers
overmaster the yellow, though the delicate tints with which the scheme
began are still present to preserve the dignity and suavity of all--the
ladies of the feast. The paths are only one or two and they never turn
abruptly and ask you to keep off their corners; they have none. Neither
have the flower-beds. They flow wideningly around the hard turnings of
the house with the grace of a rivulet. Out on the two wider sides of the
lawn nothing breaks the smooth green but a well-situated tree or two
until the limits of the premises are reached, and there, in lines that
widen and narrow and widen again and hide the surveyor's angles, the
flowers rise once more in a final burst of innumerable blossoms and
splendid hues--a kind of sunset of the garden's own.
When this place, five seasons ago, first entered the competition, it
could hardly be called a garden at all. Yet it was already superior to
many rivals. In those days it seemed to us as though scarcely one of our
working people in a hundred knew that a garden was anything more than a
bed of flowers set down anywhere and anyhow. It was a common experience
for us to be led by an unkept path and through a patch of weeds or
across an ungrassed dooryard full of rubbish, in order to reach a
so-called garden which had never spoken a civil word to the house nor
got one from it.
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