Without being able to provide such an antithesis, the garden-plotter--she means the dreadful quip--otherwise the mistress of the English Villino, with a vivid and charming picture in her mind’s eye, fondly imaged a very effective outlook upon the great shouldering moors that rise startlingly across the narrow valley at the bottom of her garden. But the lilies refused to grow.
She tried them in border after border. She set clumps of Auratums under the dining-room between the heliotrope and the Nicotianas, which swing such gushes of fragrance into the little house all the hot summer days. She got monster bulbs of Madonnas from the first specialist in the kingdom, and put them singly between the red and white roses against the upper terrace wall. She ran amok upon luscious spotted darlings; Pardelinum and Monadelphum, Polyphyllum and Parryi, and had them placed in a cool, shady walk against a background of delphiniums. She thrust Harrisi under the drawing-room bow; and the glorious scarlet-trumpeted Thunbergianum where they would flame in the middle distance. They showed many varied forms of disapproval, but were unanimous in declining to remain with us. Some were a little more polite than the others. The great trumpets blew fiercely for one season, almost as with a sound of glorious brass, in their dim nook; and a single exquisite, perfect stem of Krameri rose intact amid a dying sisterhood, and swayed, delicately proud, faintly flushed, a very princess among flowers, one long, golden September fortnight. But such meteors only make our persistent gloom, where lilies are concerned, the more signal.
The pergola had to go the way of so many cherished dreams. Yet there is an exception. With just an occasional threat of disease, there is one border favoured by the tiger-lily. She is not a very choice creature, of course; she has neither the fragrance nor the mystic grace of her cousins; but such as she is, she is welcome in our midst. On our third terrace there is a stretch of turf, curved outwards like a half-moon, against a new yew hedge: we call it the Hemicycle. In spring it is a jocund pleasaunce for crocus and scylla and flowering trees--almond, _Pyrus floribunda_, and peach; in summer the weeping standards hold the field, set between the pots of climbing geraniums. That is on the outward curve. A rough wall, overhung with Dorothy Perkins, clothed from the base with Rêve d’Or, runs straightly on the inner side. It is in the border underneath this wall that the tiger-ladies condescend to us.