England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; Siblings -- Fiction
The other garden at Bythesea I called, in opposition to the Garden of
Sleep, the Garden of Dreams: and a wonderful garden it was. It was as
young as the other garden was old, and as carefully tended as the other
was neglected. It also was situated on the edge of the cliff, and was
more like a garden out of the Arabian Nights which had been called into
being in one night by some beneficent Djin, than a garden in
matter-of-fact England. It was a garden of infinite variety and of
constant surprises, where nothing grew but the unexpected; but where
the unexpected flourished in great profusion and luxuriance. It was a
most inconsequent garden, and to wander through its changing scenes was
like wandering through the exquisite inconsistencies of a delightful
dream. The dream began on a velvety lawn, where the velvet was edged
with gay flowers and still gayer flowering shrubs, and the blue sea
made an effective background. Then it turned into a formal garden,
with paved paths between the square grass-plots, and a large fountain
in the middle lined with sky-blue tiles, as if a bit of sky had fallen
down to earth and had found earth so fascinating that it could not tear
itself away again. Then the dream took a more serious turn, and led
along sombre cloisters veiled with creepers. But it could not keep
serious for long: it soon floated back into the sunlight, and dipped
into a sunk garden paved with coral and amethyst, as only pink and
purple flowers were allowed to grow therein. Then it changed into a
rosery where it was always the time of roses, and where roses red and
roses white, roses pink and roses yellow, ran riot in well-ordered
confusion. Then the dream took quite another turn, and passed into a
Japanese garden of streams and pagodas and strange bright flowers, till
the dreamer felt as if he were living on a willow-pattern plate. But
he soon came back to England again, and found himself in an ideal
fruit-garden, where the pear-trees and the apple-trees were woven into
walls and arches and architraves of green and gold. Then a
wrought-iron gateway led him still nearer to the heart of England, for
there lay a cricket field surrounded by large trees: and beyond that
again stretched the grassy alleys and shady paths of dream-land till
they culminated in the very centre of the dream--a huge herbaceous
border so glorious in its riot of colour that the dreamer's heart
leaped up, like Wordsworth's, to behold a rainbow: but this time not a
rainbow in the sky, but on the ground.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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