_June 15._--The complaint begun in the first week of our transitional garden has already been reproved by the mid-month’s splendours. In spite of the drought and the desiccating south-east winds (which by some inscrutable decree of Providence have been sent to us this year when so much depends upon field, orchard, and garden), the roses are magnificent and of unusual promise.
Our peony beds--the mistress of the garden did know that peonies are slow ladies and will take their time--are beginning to reward her forbearance. Such a basketful as came into her bedroom to-day with the Polyantha roses!--those large, pink, scented beauties which are so satisfying to settle in big bowls. We have put them in the chapel against boughs of the service-tree. The effect is all one could wish.
The service-tree bloomed this year as never it bloomed before. It looked like the bridal bouquet of a fairy giantess! We trust this daring hyperbole will enable our readers to represent to themselves something at once immense and ethereal, misty grey, and delicate silver-white. It is of huge size and beautiful shape, and grows a little higher on the slope than the greater of the two beech-trees. For colour effect we know nothing more soul-filling than the way it stands between the ardent tawny glories of the Azalea Walk and the young jewel green of its cousin--the beech above mentioned. Put the shoulder of the moor at the back in its May mantle of coppery mauve heather not yet in bud--that is a picture to gaze upon under a blue sky, thanking God for the loveliness of the earth!
This last May, which will be ever memorable as one of the most tragic months of the war, hazard--or that _slithy tove_, the alien Hun--provided us with a background approximately _macabre_ for the radiant youthful joy. Our moor has been burnt--five fires started simultaneously one day of high east wind, and the first great swelling hill is covered with a garment as of hell. The scattered fir-trees here and there are of a livid, scorched brown. To look out on the scene and see them stand in the slaty black, casting mysterious shadows under the dome of relentless brightness we have had of late, is like looking upon a circle of Dante’s Inferno, out of one of the cool, bowery regions of his upper Purgatorio. Our daughter finds a wilder beauty in our blossom and verdure against the savage gloom beyond; but not so the Padrona. She laments the tapestry of her peaceful, rolling heights. Now, past mid-June, bracken is creeping slowly through the charred roots of the heather, and she does not want a bracken hill. It is spreading democracy, taking the place of some royal line; the rule of the irresponsible, the coarse, the mediocre; though she grants there will be beauty in the autumn when it all turns golden. And perhaps there’s a lesson to be drawn somewhere, but she will have none of it, for there is nothing so tiresome as the unpalatable moral.