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Besides, flowers grew, even in Greenfield; there were damask roses and old-fashioned lilies enough in the square garden to have furnished a whole century of poets with similes; and in the posy-bed under the front windows were tulips of Chinese awkwardness and splendor, beds of pinks spicy as all Arabia, blue hyacinths heavy with sweetness as well as bells, "pi'nies" rubicund and rank, hearts-ease clustered against the house, and sticky rose-acacias, pretty and impracticable, not to mention the grenadier files of hollyhocks that contended with fennel-bushes and scarlet-flowered beans for the precedence, and the hosts of wild flowers that bloomed by wood-edges and pond-shores wherever corn or potatoes spared a foot of soil for the lovely weeds.
They were skirting a wood, and the trailers of a great scarlet-flowered bean and a climbing cucumber smothered the ground, canopied the trees, and swarmed over the rocks. He could not distinguish these hindrances in the darkness, but he soon found that he must walk warily.
And constantly from bough to bough twined a great scarlet-flowered creeper, glowing redly in all this mystery of shade.
The village is situated on the left bank, about a mile from the mouth of the river, and contains twenty habitations, nearly all of which are merely hovels, built of lath-work and mud. The short streets, after rain, are almost impassable on account of the many puddles, and are choked up with weeds leguminous shrubs, and scarlet-flowered asclepias.
A delightful residence was made of the house; it was raised a story, surrounded by a veranda, and half hidden under beautiful trees mimosas, fig-sycamores, bauhinias, and paullinias, whose trunks were invisible beneath a network of scarlet-flowered bromelias and passion-flowers.
This patch of low growth with small heads of purple flowers was broad-leaved English thyme; that next, summer savory, used in cooking, she said. Then followed common sage and its scarlet-flowered cousin that we know as salvia; next came rue and rosemary, Ophelia's flower of remembrance, with stiff leaves.
In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance; on the side and behind, elaborate garden walks walled with high walls of box and oak and laurel, in which stand statues in green niches; gardens with little channels to bring water, even during droughts, to the myrtles, the roses, the stocks and clove pinks, over which bend with blossoms brilliant against the pale blue sky the rose-flowered oleander, the scarlet-flowered pomegranate; also aviaries and cages full of odd and harmless creatures, ferrets, guinea pigs, porcupines, squirrels, and monkeys; arbours where wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law may sew and make music; and neat lawns where the young men may play at quoits, football, or swordsticks and bucklers; and then, sweeping all round the house and gardens and terraces an undulating expanse of field and orchard, smoke-tinted with olive, bright green in spring with budding crops, russet in autumn with sere vines; and from which, in the burning noon, rises the incessant sawing noise of the cicalas, and ever and anon the high, nasal, melancholy chant of the peasant, lying in the shade of barn door or fig tree till the sun shall sink and he can return to his labour.
The history of this plant is not known; but it is supposed to be a hybrid between C. Pitajayi or variabilis and one of the scarlet-flowered Phyllocactuses, or, possibly, C. speciosissimus. It first flowered at Kew, in July, 1870.
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