Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... After Long Years The Garden of To-Day -- A Tuscan Summer July. I don't remember what statesman it was who started the theory that the man who made no mistakes never made anything else. This is a consoling doctrine for amateur makers of gardens, most of whom know what it is to realize how much better a garden plan could be carried out, if it had to be done over again. Still, when all my own failures, mistakes, and shortcomings have been reckoned up, when I look out upon the garden as it is to-day, and think of the piece of waste land of which I took possession fourteen years ago, there is a distinct balance to the good, as there well may be. As I have already said, from the middle of February to the end of June, the garden is a succession of beautiful pictures. But after that date, when the glories of the first flowerings of snowdrop and scilla, the hyacinths of March, the early double tulips of April and the scent of Banksia and wistaria, when the azaleas of May have gone by, and the callas and imantophyllums have been removed to the shade and obscurity of the north side, when the border roses and Spanish irises are all past and the stately madonna lilies have been picked, when the Rhynchospermum jasminoides has finished its long flowering, when all these joys of scent and colour have gone by, then there comes a season when the garden is a memory and a hope, rather than a place to be enjoyed in the present, and a kind of fallow time ensues when it and you exist but do not live; when one's mind turns regretfully to the herbaceous borders of the north, and longs for the English turf, cool and fresh and green. You know that in September the balance will be in your favour, and that there will probably be a good three months when you will...
