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On one side, the grounds were laid out in very formal style, with straight walks, clipped box hedges, an old stone fountain, and a perfect bowling-green of a lawn; while at right angles to this there was a plot of land in which all regularity was set at naught, and sweet-peas, tulips, hollyhocks, dahlias, gillyflowers, wall-flowers, sun-flowers, and a dozen others equally sweet and friendly shared the soil with gooseberry bushes and thriving apple-trees.
Jackson holds that the manufacture of silken poppies and crewel sun-flowers is a 'respectable industry, intended only to keep idle hands out of mischief." Mrs. Jackson loved flowers almost as though they were children. She writes: "I bore on this June day a sheaf of the white columbine, one single sheaf, one single root; but it was almost more than I could carry.
The brightest geraniums blossomed in small beds through the grass, and several long flower beds were one brilliant mass of bloom, while giant sun-flowers reared their golden heads the entire length of the farm. It was gay, but I had hoped to please Beauty. "What is that?" said the girl, straining her head out of the carriage. "Don't know," said the youth, "guess it's a store."
The gorgeous crowns of the sun-flowers were nothing but grotesque black mummy-heads set on lean, dead bodies, and the clump of big castor-plants, buffeted by the wind, leaned this way and that like giants in a drunken orgy trying to keep one another from falling down.
All the front of the house was draped with purple clematis; in the garden were sun-flowers and hollyhocks and lowly plants innumerable; on the red and lichened tiles pigeons were cooing themselves into a doze; the horse's hoofs rang with a pleasant clearness on the stones as he was led to his cool stable.
Mother Simon climbed on a chair to reach the bull's-eye, and in this manner could see the altar. It was covered with a lace cloth and draped with green wreaths. In the middle stood a little frame containing relics; at the corners were two little orange-trees, and all along the edge were silver candlesticks, porcelain vases containing sun-flowers, lilies, peonies, and tufts of hydrangeas.
Between the window and the hill, however, was a small old English garden, closely hedged round with yew hedges, and blazing now with every flower that an English August knows with sun-flowers, tiger-lilies, and dahlias white and red.
It was a dash through the dim woods where the white Indian Pipes raised their tiny, waxen tapers, and the squirrels skirled indignantly at him from the tree-tops; a leap across the stream where the water-lilies made a fairy bridge of green and gold, a scramble through the underbrush, and he was at the edge of the little pasture-field, and saw the old home buried in orchard trees, and Aunt Kirsty's garden a blaze of sun-flowers and asters.
I remember one such particularly, for at the head of it was a cross of carved wood, and at the foot of it, facing the cross, three tall sun-flowers; then in the midst of the cemetery was a cross of stone, carved on one side with the Crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, and on the other with our Lady holding the Divine Child.
The old Church had been burned, and that was the reason why the monks caused me to build the new one; the buildings of the Abbey were built at the same time as the burned-down Church, more than a hundred years before I was born, and they were on the north side of the Church, and joined to it by a cloister of round arches, and in the midst of the cloister was a lawn, and in the midst of that lawn, a fountain of marble, carved round about with flowers and strange beasts, and at the edge of the lawn, near the round arches, were a great many sun-flowers that were all in blossom on that autumn day, and up many of the pillars of the cloister crept passion-flowers and roses.
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