“Which only proves,” said Virginia when we got outside, “that even the worst of us may profit by hearing the truth spoken in love!”
THE flame of August is over all the garden, a blaze of yellow and scarlet, orange and red, for most of the blues and pinks go out with July, though the lavender flowers are opening intensely blue, and big clumps of eryngium, with blue stems as well as blue flower-heads, make masses of contrasting colour amidst the sunflowers, single and double, and the eschscholtzias and marigolds glowing golden and undaunted by the hottest sunshine. The flowers of the Red-hot-poker rival their namesakes; broad spreading clumps of montbretia, each waving hundreds of fiery orange and red blossoms, have sprung into existence, since last we were here, from lowly modest-looking patches of green blades.
The second crop of Gloire-de-Dijon roses are out, likewise holding in their hearts remembrance of the hot sunshine that pervades the earth. Geraniums, turned out of doors “to get a little air” (though there certainly isn’t much to get just now!), are shouting aloud in pride of their heavy, scarlet bosses. The mountain-ash trees contribute plenty of colour, each branch bent down with a smother of bunches of berries, which are being eagerly devoured by blackbirds, thrushes and hawfinches.
Tall red and yellow hollyhocks try to persuade you that they are nearly as high, and quite as brilliant, as the mountain-ash.
Nasturtiums trail all over the place, climbing where there is next to nothing to support them, with flowers so thick you lose count of the foliage. And what a dazzling mass they make, touched apparently with every shade of yellow and brown and red, from blossoms of palest primrose marked with vivid scarlet, past salmon-colour streaked with orange, and lemon yellow splashed with chocolate, to dark mahogany-red smoked with deep purple-brown. They smother weeds (that gain in impudence as the season advances), and cover bare places where bulbs and earlier blooming plants have died down. They hang over the tops of walls; they crowd the border pinks into the paths; they get mixed up with the hedges, and surprise you by sending out vermilion flowers at the top of a sedate old box-tree clipped to look like a solid square table. They run out of the little white gate into the lane, and they creep under the rails into the orchard. Indeed, there are times when their exuberance almost makes one tired, more especially if the thermometer favours the nineties!