There is one spot in the Flower-Patch that is loved by grown-ups as
well as birds. It is the little grotto that is just outside the cottage
back-door. It has made itself by making the best of circumstances. Can
I describe it so that you will see it, I wonder?
First there comes a narrow garden bed, full of old-fashioned
flowers—Bee-balm, Jacob’s Ladder, and Solomon’s Seal; then a rough
stone wall about two feet high keeps the earth above from tumbling
down on to the narrow bed below. The whole of the garden being
on a steeply sloping hillside, the earth has to be propped up at
intervals by these lovely little ranks of natural rockery, planted by
Nature with hart’s-tongue and a variety of other little ferns, with
mother-of-millions and creeping ivy, with stone-crop and house-leeks.
How _do_ the things get there? How do they plant themselves? Isn’t it
marvellous this unending gardening of Nature!
On a level with the top of the low wall is another garden bed. You
see the ground is rising, rising up to the clouds all the time at the
back of the cottage, just as it is falling, falling down to the river
in the valley all the time in front of the cottage. This next terrace
bed loses itself entirely in a miniature wild wood and drops down into
a tiny dell, just big enough for a couple of small children to give a
tea-party to the fairies in.
Here it is that the beauty of the whole place seems to climax. The
other side of the dell is bounded by a large grey boulder, about six
feet high, flanked by a few smaller ones tumbling about at various
angles. The stone was too big for the original gardener to move, so
he wisely left it where it was. They often do that on these hills. I
know one cottage that has a most substantial stone table in the centre
of the kitchen. It is just a huge stone that was too big to move by
ordinary methods when they erected the cottage, and so they simply left
it, and built the kitchen round it.
But my boulder in the grotto is not so much for use as for beauty.
True, it supports a plum tree that springs up from behind it, just
outside the orchard rails. But the way Nature has festooned that rock
is worth going a long way to study. From the ground at one side springs
a wild rose with stout stems that grow fairly straight and erect,
considering it is a wild rose, and this sends out long curved and
arched sprays, dotted with pink blossoms.
At the other side is a yellow jasmine, evidently a stray from the
garden.
The stone itself is thickly covered with moss, small-leaved ivy (and
isn’t small-leaved ivy lovely in its colouring very often, in the early
months of the year, some brown and yellow, some red and green?) and
little ferns, till scarcely a trace of the grey stone can be seen, and
where it does push through it is splashed with milky-green lichen.
Then wandering over all is a wealth of honeysuckle that catches hold
of everything impartially, and twines itself in all directions. At the
base of the precipitous boulder the grass is thick and green; violets,
the big purple-blue scented sort, cluster all around the corners, and
hold up rich-looking blossoms; primroses laugh out in the sunshine;
snowdrops dingle their bells to a delightful melody, if only our ears
were more delicately tuned to catch the music; daffodils blow their own
trumpets above their clumps of blue-green leaves; the ground-ivy creeps
and creeps and lights up the green with its lovely blue flowers that
have never received half the praise that is their due. And in a damp
spot there is a mass of blue forget-me-nots, with one clump that is
pure white.
Large ferns send up giant fronds to make cool shadows at one end. Tiny
ferns busy themselves with the decoration of odd corners. A hazel bush
reaches over and joins hands with the plum tree, to form a fitting roof
to so lovely a dell; as I write—in February—it is a mass of fluttering
catkins, and the plum tree is talking about shaking out a few flowers.
But without these the place is already full of blossoms.
In a month or six weeks the old trees in the orchard behind will be
like bouquets of pink and white blossoms.
You approach the grotto by a tiny path, about wide enough for a child;
the entrance to the path is marked by a stunted old bush of lavender
at one side, and a grey-green clump of sage at the other. They stand,
with stems twisted and rugged like gnomes, guarding the entrance to the
fairy’s playground; but if you rub them the right way they send up a
lovely fragrance, and then you know you are admitted to the freedom of
the enchanted spot.
It is so sheltered in this corner, and protected from the cold winds by
the high hill behind, that even the ferns from last year are green and
fresh-looking, you would think there had not been any winter here. And
the brambles that clamber over the orchard rail—assuring the world at
large that they are a highly respectable orchard-grown fruit tree, and
not a wild weed—are still green and crimson and a rich purple with the
lovely tints of last autumn.
The birds are fond of this grotto, and other wild things have found
it out. Last summer, when the boulder seemed to be dripping with large
juicy crimson honeysuckle berries, I watched a big bullfinch gorging to
his heart’s content, his red waistcoat mingling well with the red of
the berries. Mrs. Bullfinch was also there, in her less obtrusive grey
and browny-black dress, and she had a couple of youngsters too. But do
you think the father had any intention of sharing the delicacies? Not a
bit of it! Every time his wife approached from the rear surreptitiously
to snatch a berry, he turned round and drove her off (I really could
have pardoned her if she had joined the suffragettes on the spot). She
ranged her family along the orchard rail just above, and made various
attempts to forage for them. But it was no use. So she took up her
position beside the family on the rail and waited patiently, making
plaintive sounds the while, till Mr. Bully had stuffed to repletion and
flew away. I was glad there were a few hundred berries still left for
the family. And didn’t they have a good time!
Just now the blue tits are very busy about the fruit trees, and a robin
comes out from somewhere in the grotto at unexpected moments and stands
motionless on a stone, with a bright eye cocked up inquiringly at the
human intruder. I fancy he has chosen it for his summer residence.
A squirrel is very attached to this part of the garden. Sometimes one
sees him, when the nuts are ripe, scurrying along the orchard rail in
ever such a hurry, his chestnut-red tail bigger than himself. There are
specially good nuts on that hazel-tree.
This morning I went out of the back-door, to find a large rabbit
sitting and sunning himself at his ease among the snowdrops and violets
in the little dell—within a yard of the door.
The weather has been like April to-day, brilliant sunshine and
heavy showers. Suddenly the sky behind the cottage was lit up with a
rainbow—a glorious span of colour that seemed to be resting on the
hill-top. Then it dropped a bit lower at one end, and the big pine
trees that stand higher up at the top of the orchard looked most
majestic against it. Lower it seemed to drop, and then I distinctly
saw the place where it touched the ground. You know they say there
is a pot of gold buried at the end of the rainbow—where do you think
that rainbow pointed? Why, straight at my fairy dell! So I know there
is gold buried under that boulder, and that is why there is always
sunshine peeping through the green; first it comes out in the yellow
jasmine, then it flares in the daffodils, later you find it in the
dancing buttercups and in the lovely honeysuckle, finally it waves to
you a bright “Good-bye, Summer,” in the clump of golden-rod that is
near the entrance.