With many thanks for your kind sayings, I am, dear Madam,

Yours very truly,
JULIANA HORATIA EWING.

TO THE REV.  J. GOING.

October 11, 1883.

DEAR MR. GOING,

I append a rough plan of my small garden.  We do not stand dead E. and W., but perhaps a little more so than the arrows show.  We are very high and the winds are often high too!  The walls are brick—­and that south bed is very warm.  I mean to put bush roses down what is marked the Potato Patch—­it is the original soil with one year’s potato crop where I am mixing vegetables and flowers.  The borders are given up to flowers—­mixed herbaceous ones.  And on my south wall I have already planted a Wistaria, a blue Passion-flower—­and a Rose of Sharon!  I am keeping a warm corner for “Fortune’s Yellow”—­and now looking forward with more delight and gratitude than I can express to “Cloth of Gold”!

I have sent to order the “well-rotted”—­and the Gardener for Saturday morning!

Now will you present my grateful acknowledgments to Mrs. Going, and say that with some decent qualms at my own greediness—­I “too-too” gratefully accept her further kind offers.  I deeply desire some “Ladders to Heaven”—­(does she know that old name for Lilies of the Valley?)—­and I am devoted to pansies and have only a scrap or two.  A neighbour has given me a few Myosotis—­but I am a daughter of the horse-leech I fear where flowers are concerned, and if you really have one or two TO SPARE I thankfully accept.  The truly Irish liberality of Mrs. Going’s suggestions—­emboldens me to ask if you happen to have in your garden any of the Hellebores?  I have one good clump of Xmas Rose—­but I have none of those green-faced varieties for which I have a peculiar predilection.

(I do not expect much sympathy from you!  In fact I fear you will think that any one whose taste is so grotesque as to have a devotion for Polyanthuses—­Oxlips—­Green Hellebores—­every variety of Arum (including the “stinking” one!)—­Dog’s-tooth violets—­Irises—­Auriculas—­coloured primroses—­and such dingy and undeveloped denizens of the flower garden—­is hardly worthy to possess the glowing colours and last results of development in the Queen of flowers!)

But I DO appreciate roses I assure you.

And I am most deeply grateful to you for letting me benefit by—­what is in itself such a treat! your—­enthusiasm.

Mrs. Going seems to think that my soil and situation are better than yours.

Could it be possible that you might have any rose under development that you would care to deposit here for the winter and fetch away in the spring?  I don’t know if change of air and soil is ever good for them?

I fear you’ll think mine a barren little patch on which to expend your kindness!  But you are a true Ama—­teur—­and will look at my Villa Garden through rose-coloured spectacles!