THE FAIR GARDEN OF ENGLAND.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 21 November 1923, Page 10

THE FAIR GARDEN OF ENGLAND.

(From the letter of a Breton girl on holiday in England.) This motor trip has hern a revelation. 1 shall always think of England as of a garden. Mon Dim, its greenness, its tidiness, its daintiness! It is lovely ami it is lovable. Oui. 1 shall remember it as a garden to which tired people withdraw: those that have spent busy, scorching days in quest of money and power in dreary oliiees. and those that have spent long lonely years in lands where the sun is merciless and the huge, dark trees protect snakes and poisonous plants. How they must yearn, these people, lor the clear waters, tne cloudy skies, and the roses of England! For this is the land of roses. Boses are everywhere; roses queening it in that part of the garden which is theirs, roses clinging to the trunks of trees, forming archways and covered paths roses climbing up to Juliet's hair.my, roses nodding at you over walls. This countryside is very different from" thn- in Brittany. Aly Induced Duche is a- peasant country, where every little meagre field means a triumph over the moor, and hard toil to extract just enough for bare need. These little cottages which dot England are delicicux. Women in print frocks standing on the doorsteps show that they belong to poor people, wording jni’ii and laborers, 1 am told. Each has its front garden bright with ramblers and nasturtiums, scent d with lilies and lavenders, and where dignified hollyhocks survey the road from behind walls. I have bin to shut my eye# and before me stands again that cottage near Beading, with its (plaint, disproportionate roof, too heavy for its Inti - mss, like the head of a thinker too big for the slender body. A flag path leads to the door, a path which lied between rows of lusty lavender bushes over which madonna lilies sway. And then I think of the dark Brotton houses, with garden , \\ here everything beautiful has been elbowed out by something useful, where cabbage, pars--1 y and beans are tended lovingly, o - copy every inch of the ground and absorb all the sun, while a few geraniums or Sweet Williams shiver in loneliness and uncongenial surroundinguntil the market day come . when they will sell for a ft w pence. ' These English people love Nature. ' That is the essence of poetry. But they cannot speak about it. They are •trangely shy and inarticulate. Th. ir gard ns. then, express that inn.-t. I-;*..-of, and communion with. Nature God ha- made us Bretons thrifty, hardworking, courageous. He has en- ’ (lowed u« with -oine of the ’ >riues which make great races; but He hits | closed <>ur eyes to the beauty of the world and made us peer instead at I another world, through the portals of I Death. -