United States or Saudi Arabia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"What dear wildflowers!" she murmured now, as restraining Cleopatra's coquettish gambols, she rode more slowly along, and spied the bluebells standing up among tangles of green, making exquisite contrast with the golden glow of aconites and the fragile white of wood-anemones, "They are ever so much prettier than the hot-house things one gets any day in Paris and London!
These are wild creatures of every kind, as serpents, scorpions, great snakes, crocodiles, tigers, wolves, foxes, swine, owls of different kinds, bats, rats, and mice, frogs, locusts, spiders, and noxious insects of many kinds; also hemlocks and aconites, and all kinds of poisons, both of herbs and of earths; in a word, everything hurtful and deadly to man.
Here the syringa, a name sometimes given by horticultural pedants to the lilac, for no reason at all except to create confusion in the innocent minds of amateur growers, was opening its white 'mock orange' blossoms, and a mass of flowering aconites spread out before him like a carpet of woven gold.
The garden was adjoined by a sort of wilderness, with big trees and ground-ivy, and open spaces in which aconites and snowdrops were beginning to show themselves. Father Payne, I gathered, was fond of the garden and often worked there; but there were no curiosities it was all very simple.
A few aconites showed their yellow heads above the soil. "What are those wretched little flowers?" said Mr. Redmayne, pointing at them contemptuously. "Oh, don't say that," said Howard; "they are always the first to struggle up, and they are the earliest signs of spring. Those are aconites." "Aconites? Deadly poison!" said Mr. Redmayne, in a tone of horror.
"All right, mother; you have made me a bit curious, I confess," said Harry, leaving the room. The garden in front of Holly Lodge was formal just a carriage-drive, and a bit of shrubbery, and a grass-plat with prim beds on it, which had various flower eruptions at different periods of the year. First snowdrops, aconites, and crocuses, then tulips, then geraniums.
The first snowdrops, the earliest aconites, perked up their pretty heads in Mary's cottage garden, and throughout all nature there came that inexplicable, indefinite, soft pulsation of new life and new love which we call the spring.
And a serene contentment took possession of her, a marvellous peace that brought healing in its train, for with the earliest days of February, when the first snowdrops were beginning to make their white way through the dark earth, she was able to be moved from her bed, and carried down to the morning room, where, lying on her couch, near a sparkling fire, with a bunch of early flowering aconites opening their golden eyes in a vase beside her, she looked almost as if she were getting well enough soon to rise and walk again.
She noted a little yellow aconite that had opened its bloom prematurely in the shadow of the wall, and the sight of it brought her some kind of comfort. He had loved aconites and planted many of them, though because of his winter absences years had gone by since he had seen one with his eyes, at any rate in England.
In the stone basin the surface of the water trembled, glistening in broken curves of silver white. Along the narrow border, beneath the soot-stained eastern wall, yellow and mauve crocuses and yellow aconites opened wide, greeting the gentle warmth. Trees in the neighbouring gardens were thick with bud. Busily the sparrows and starlings came and went.
Word Of The Day