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Updated: June 21, 2025
The old house seemed to have grown old and mellow like a rock or crag; to have sprung up out of the ground; and nature, working patiently with rain and sun and wind, drooping the stonecrop from the parapet, fringing the parapets with snapdragons and wallflowers, touching the old roofs with orange and grey lichens, had done the rest.
The weather has been very hot for a long time, but the rain in the morning had had a wonderful effect on my flowers, and as I drove away I could not help noticing how charming the borders in front of the house were looking, with their white hollyhocks, and white snapdragons, and fringe of feathery marigolds.
To-day she cut more lavishly than usual in Fanny's honour, and when, just as the lunch gong sounded, she rested from her labours, the lovely old house was a dream of beauty and colour and scent. Snapdragons, in every shade of yellow and pink and deep, rich rose, stood in tall jars, wherever there was a dark corner to be lighted up.
He specially requested me to observe the geraniums; there were ten species, many of them of extraordinary size and with magnificent blossoms. Roses I saw, too, in great abundance; and tall snapdragons, and bushes of rosemary, and many flowers unknown to me.
Such a day made glad the heart. All the flags of July were waving; the sun and the poppies flaming; white butterflies spiring up and twining, and the bees busy on the snapdragons. The lime-trees were coming into flower. Tall white lilies in the garden beds already rivaled the delphiniums; the York and Lancaster roses were full-blown round their golden hearts.
'Now we shall soon have evening Chapel, a great deal of singing, a few short words from me; then a happy, merry, innocent evening, native dances, coffee, biscuit, and snapdragons to finish with. 'If you had been here to-day, you would indeed have been filled with surprise and thankfulness and hope.
In addition to the flowers chosen for beauty of colour, this lover of children and of gardens wants Canterbury Bells to ring, Forget-me-nots because they can stand so much watering, and "flowers with faces," pansies, sweet-peas, lupins, snapdragons, monkey flowers, red and white dead nettles, and red clover to bring the bees.
She had all sorts of pretty fancies about her flowers, and loved to tell the children the story of the pansy, and show them how the step-mother-leaf sat up in her green chair in purple and gold; how the two own children in gay yellow had each its little seat, while the step children, in dull colors, both sat on one small stool, and the poor little father in his red nightcap, was kept out of sight in the middle of the flower; that a monk's dark face looked out of the monk's-hood larkspur; that the flowers of the canary-vine were so like dainty birds fluttering their yellow wings, that one almost expected to see them fly away, and the snapdragons that went off like little pistol-shots when you cracked them.
Great purple snapdragons hung from clefts in the rocks, inula flashed gorgeously yellow, white melilot raised its graceful drooping blossoms, and hemp-agrimony made the bees sing a drowsy song of the brimming cup of summer.
It was filled with all the dear old-fashioned flowers Sweet William and Sweet Mary, bachelor's buttons, pansies and mignonette, old country daisies and snapdragons and lilies of the valley and, in the centre of the beds, great masses of peonies, while all around, peeping from under the hedges of old man, were poppies of every hue.
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