In the Garden The tale of woe and delays becomes
monotonous. Lawns still squelch underfoot, and flower-beds are streaked with slimy patches of mud. For a week the daffodils have been in much the same relationship with the winds of March as was the Oxford with the Cambridge boat on that tempestuous Saturday. Sunk! Before the last two keen night-frosts came my neighbour had a wonderful exhibition of rhododendron praecox, each bush showing a solid mass of mauve bloom, relieved by a few bushes of corylopsis (Panciflora) whose gentle, biscuit-coloured flowers made a good contrast to the fullness of the rhododendrons.
The shrubs, hardy and well set, are now beginning to come into their season of pride. I was reminded by the Pieria japonica, with its masses of grey sprays, of the fields of asphodel which I saw one April down along the sea-shore at the foot of the Pyrenees, near the Spanish frontier at Port Bou. This colour at first is disappointing ; but gradually it begins to affect one's imagination with a kind of negative wonder. There arc cold as well as warm pleasures, and often they are the more enduring. Many blackbirds are building in and around my garden at this moment, and I am busy signing leases with them, each one with a codicil in which I reserve for myself and family free seats at the concerts which will shortly follow. For me the blackbird's song is the song of songs, and a
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