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There were two or three guelder-rose bushes the wild shrub which were covered in June with white bloom; not in snowy balls like the garden variety, but flat and circular, the florets at the edge of the circle often whitest, and those in the centre greenish.
There, indeed, just as I had left it, lay the deep-green grassy lawn, with its richly-burdened flower-pots, its laburnums, and white and purple lilacs, and drooping guelder-rose bushes, and its great English walnut-tree towering, like a Titan, in the centre.
Often the stream is overhung and invisible, or dammed and left in soak, breeding frogs, gnats, and flies. The trees are always tall and beautifully grown, whatever their age, for the moisture and warmth force vertical growth; the smaller bushes hawthorn, briar, and wild guelder-rose also assume graceful forms unhidden, for they always bow their heads towards the sun-reflecting stream.
For it must be remembered that the brookside garden is in nearly every case a shaded garden, beneath the tall trees natural to such places. All beautiful flowering shrubs and trees, such as the guelder-rose, the pink may, the hardy azaleas, and certain of the more beautiful rhododendrons will aid the background of the brook garden, and flourish naturally in its sheltered hollow.
It looked even prettier than its wont just then, that town of villas, in the first fresh tenderness of its wan spring foliage, the first full flush of lilac, laburnum, horse-chestnut, and guelder-rose. The air was heavy with the odour of May and the hum of bees. Philip paused a while at the corner, by the ivied cottage, admiring it silently. He was glad he lived there so very aristocratic!
Out of doors in the garden an owl was hooting and the night air breathed on him its perfume of lilac and violets. How quiet it was and how fragrant and dim! one could scarcely distinguish between the dewy glimmer of turf and the dark island-like thickets of guelder-rose and other flowering shrubs.
I can walk along the path the path to Paradise still lined with the blue-eyed speedwell and red campion; I know where the copse is carpeted with the bluebell and ragged robin, where grow the alders, and the hazels rich with brown nuts, the beeches and the oaks; where the flower of the yellow broom blazes like gold in the noontide sun; where the stockdove coos overhead in the ivy; where the kingfisher darts past like a shaft of sapphire, and the water ouzel flies up stream; where the pheasant glides out from his home in the wood to feed on the headland of the wheat field; where the partridge broods in the dust with her young; where the green lane is bordered by the guelder-rose or wayfaring tree, the raspberry, strawberry, and cherry, the wild garlic of starlike flowers, the woodruff, fragrant as new-mown hay; the yellow pimpernel on the hedge side.
Near by, a laburnum drooped in shower of gold over a bush of delicate white guelder-rose as Zeus over Danæ. Upon the wall of the home wistaria hung her pastel-shaded pendants of flower, like the notes of some beautiful melody, sweet and sad, along the giant staves of her stem.
Then there are patches of candytuft running from white into pink, crimson flowers of the little crane's-bill, and spurges whose floral leaves are now losing their golden green and taking a hue of fiery brown. An open wood, chiefly of dwarf oak, and shrubs such as the wayfaring tree, the guelder-rose, and the fly-honeysuckle, now stretches along the opposite side of the gorge.
The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields. All was not sadness. The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder-rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw.
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