As I stood in the pathway, I heard Burbidge walking up and down the paths, giving orders in the Shropshire tongue that I love so well. A mantle of spring splendour had fallen upon all. Lines of yellow crocuses shone like threads of gold. Crown Imperials were opening their rich brown, metallic-looking blossoms. Pink and white daphne bushes perfumed the air, and I noted that a host of hungry bees were humming greedily round them. Chionodoxas of all shades, were looking enchantingly fair. The blue Sardensis was opening its petals, of the same wonderful sapphire-blue shade as the Alpine gentian. Then in blossom also I noted Chionodoxa Luciliæ, that had the delicacy and daintiness of a piece of china, and lovely Alleni, that recalled the beauty of a sunset sky when the gold is dying, and when celestial amber is dissolving and melting into exquisite tones of mauve and lavender. A little later, I found Burbidge hard at work pruning my great bed of hybrid teas, and hybrid perpetual roses, that I have planted with alternate rows of old Dutch and Darwin tulips, with English and Spanish irises, and with lines of grape and Botryoides hyacinths. "Us must get a bit of the bush off," said my old gardener, as he plied his pruning scissors. I begged him, however, not to cut my hybrid teas too hard, as now so many gardeners are inclined to do, for roses in Shropshire, it seemed to me, did not like too much of the knife, or of the French drastic treatment. "Let it be a rose _bush_ in England," I pleaded. "Right you are, ma'am," replied Burbidge, "for there's many as uses the knife as a child the whip. Most of the roses here be on their own roots, and so, healthy and abiding. Manetti stuff have blooms big as saucers the first year, but go out the next year like candles as the wind's overmastered. They be like most fandangles--no stay in them." [Sidenote: THE VERMILLION ROSE] So saying, my old friend plied his scissors vigorously, and the click, click, resounded all through the garden. Before I left the red-walled garden, I had a word with my old gardener about my hedge of Austrian briars. What a wonderful single rose it is, and the variety is very ancient. Parkinson mentions it in his "Theatre of Plants," and calls it "the vermilion rose of Austria." If we prune it this year, we shall get no flowers, I lamented, and I am always very loth to let the pruning shears work their will with my pet rose. Then I turned to my moss roses: pink, white, purple, and the most beautiful variety of all, the old crested. They were all big bushes and must be kept in shape, but should not be pruned in the ordinary sense.