Spring in a Shropshire AbbeyGaskell, Catherine Henrietta Milnes, Lady
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Spring in a Shropshire Abbey
Gaskell, Catherine Henrietta Milnes, Lady
Shropshire (England) -- Description and travel; Wenlock Abby (England)
These delightful roses, as has been justly said, combine all that is
best of old and new. Almost all of them are sweet scented, and even
in cold latitudes they flower twice, freely, in each year. Amongst
those that I love best are Augustine Guinoiseau, and Camoens. Beyond
these, on the southern side of the garden, extend my great bed of
hybrid perpetuals, which stand our cold Shropshire climate so bravely
and bloom often into late November. I stopped to admire a beautiful
specimen of the Earl of Dufferin that seemed almost purple in its
sombre magnificence, and felt almost dazzled at the splendour of
Éclair. Then I paused to smell a Fisher Holmes, and gathered an
almost black rose, which Burbidge told me a few days ago was a new
rose to him, and was called the Black Prince. Such a mysterious black
rose as it was, with a faint sweet distant smell, like new-mown grass
after a summer shower.
[Sidenote: IRISES AND ROSES]
Between each row of roses I have planted rows of the beautiful
English and Spanish irises in turns. These bulbs, I find, like the
damp and shade caused by the neighbourhood of the bushes, and the
effect of yellow, purple, blue, and lavender, between the pink, red,
and white of the roses was enchantingly beautiful. Then I looked
upwards and was delighted to see that my Crimson Ramblers and
Ayrshire and Penzance briers were all ramping away to my, and to
their, hearts' content over their pillars, and covering their bowers
and arches with trails and clusters of glory. I call my arches and
bowers my garden in the clouds. Nobody quite knows how beautiful the
Crimson Rambler can be till they have seen it against a background of
summer sky. Just out of the garden stretched the plantation of firs,
Scotch and Austrian, with a border of ribes, laurels, hollies, and
yews. The plantation is very small, but it gives a sense of silence
between the Abbey and the old town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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