Elizabeth and her German Garden | Page 5

it. Those five
years were spent in a flat in a town, and during their whole
interminable length I was perfectly miserable and perfectly healthy,
which disposes of the ugly notion that has at times disturbed me that
my happiness here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion.
And while we were wasting our lives there, here was this dear place
with dandelions up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown and
completely effaced, in winter so lonely, with nobody but the north wind
taking the least notice of it, and in May--in all those five lovely Mays--
no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more wonderful
masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing, the virginia creeper
madder every year, until at last, in October, the very roof was wreathed
with blood-red tresses, the owls and the squirrels and all the blessed
little birds reigning supreme, and not a living creature ever entering the
empty house except the snakes, which got into the habit during those
silent years of wriggling up the south wall into the rooms on that side
whenever the old housekeeper opened the windows. All that was
here,--peace, and happiness, and a reasonable life,-- and yet it never
struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I am astonished, and can
in no way account for the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this
far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven. Indeed, so little did it
enter my head to even use the place in summer, that I submitted to
weeks of seaside life with all its horrors every year; until at last, in the
early spring of last year, having come down for the opening of the
village school, and wandering out afterwards into the bare and desolate
garden, I don't know what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought
back my childhood with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a
garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It was the beginning of my real life,
my coming of age as it were, and entering into my kingdom. Early
March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless and sad and
lonely enough out there in the damp and silence, yet there I stood
feeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of spring that
I used to as a child, and the five wasted years fell from me like a cloak,
and the world was full of hope, and I vowed myself then and there to
nature, and have been happy ever since.
My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps
that it might be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it at

any rate for a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks
from the end of April into June, during which I was here alone,
supposed to be superintending the painting and papering, but as a
matter of fact only going into the house when the workmen had gone
out of it.
How happy I was! I don't remember any time quite so perfect since the
days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar
on my eleven o'clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with
dandelions and daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its
charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately
now than then, and never would endure to see them all mown away if I
were not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their
little faces again as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I lived in a
world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three
lawns,-- they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into
meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,-- and under and among
the groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white
anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in
particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so
beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the
painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few
stray periwinkles and Solomon's Seal, and all the birdcherries
blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to the joy
of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs--masses and masses of
them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the side of
walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right
past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could see,
shining glorious against