On the garden side the border was broken every ten feet or so with great shrubs of our lemon verbena, called lemon balm by Mrs. Puffin.  It seemed impossible that such large, heavily wooded plants could be lifted for winter protection in the cellar, yet such Mrs. Puffin assured us was the case.  So I shall grow mine to this size if possible, for what one can do may be accomplished by another,—­that is the tonic of seeing other gardens than one’s own.  Between the lemon verbenas were fragrant-leaved geraniums of many flavours—­rose, nutmeg, lemon, and one with a sharp peppermint odour, also a skeleton-leaved variety; while a low-growing plant with oval leaves and half-trailing habit and odd odour, Mrs. Puffin called apple geranium, though it does not seem to favour the family.  Do you know it?

Bee balm in a blaze of scarlet made glowing colour amid so much green, and strangely enough the bluish lavender of the taller-growing sister, wild bergamot, seems to harmonize with it; while farther down the line grew another member of this brave family of horsemints with almost pink, irregular flowers of great beauty.

Southernwood formed fernlike masses here and there; dwarf tansy made the edging, together with the low, yellow-flowered musk, which Aunt Lavinia, now quite up in such things, declared to be a “musk-scented mimulus!” whatever that may be!  Stocks, sweet sultan, and tall wands of evening primrose graded this border up to another shrubbery.

Of mignonette the garden boasts a half dozen species, running from one not more than six inches in height with cinnamon-red flowers to a tall variety with pointed flower spikes, something of the shape of the white flowers of the clethra bush or wands of Culver’s root that grow along the fence at Opal Farm.  It is not so fragrant as the common mignonette, but would be most graceful to arrange with roses or sweet peas.  Aunt Lavinia says that she thinks that it is sold under the name of Miles spiral mignonette.

Close to the road, where the fence angle allows for a deep bed and the lilacs grade from the tall white of the height of trees down to the compact bushes of newer French varieties, lies the violet bed, now a mass of green leaves only, but by these Aunt Lavinia’s eye read them out and found here the English sweet wild violet, as well as the deep purple double garden variety, the tiny white scented that comes with pussy-willows, the great single pansy violet of California, and the violets grown from the Russian steppes that carpeted the ground under your “mother tree.”

From this bed the lilies-of-the-valley start and follow the entire length of the front fence, as you preach on the sunny side, the fence itself being hidden by a drapery of straw-coloured and pink Chinese honeysuckle that we called at home June honeysuckle, though this is covered with flower sprays in late August, and must be therefore a sort of monthly-minded hybrid, after the fashion of the hybrid tea-rose.