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.