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,