ppreciate the joy of having breakfast and tea
on the terrace with the birds singing in the boughs of the trees.

I have written at length in the other chapters of my ideas of
house-furnishing, and in this one I want to give you my ideas of garden
guilding. True, we had the old garden plan to work from, and trees two
hundred years old, and old vine-covered walls. Who couldn't accomplish a
perfect garden with such essentials, people said! Well, it wasn't so
easy as it seems. You can select furnishings for a room with fair
success, because you can see and feel textures, and colors, and the
lines of the furniture and curtains. But gardens are different--you
cannot make grass and flowers grow just so on short notice! You plant
and dig and plant again, before things grow as you have visualized them.

There was a double ring of trees in one corner of our domain, enclosing
the _salle de verdure_, or outdoor drawing-room. In the center of this
enchanted circle there was a statue by Clodion, a joyous nymph, holding
a baby faun in her arms. There were several old stone benches under the
trees that must have known the secrets of the famous ladies of the
Eighteenth Century courts. The _salle de verdure_ looked just as it did
when the little daughters of Louis XV came here to have their afternoon
cakes and tea, so we did not try to change this bit of our garden.

My idea of making over the place was to leave the part of the garden
against the stone walls in the rear in its tangled, woodsy state, and to
build against it a trellis that would be in line with the terrace.
Between the trellis and the terrace there was to be a smooth expanse of
greensward, bordered with flowers. It seemed very simple, but I hereby
confess that I built and tore down the trellis three times before it
pleased me! I had to make it worthy of the statue by Pradier that was
given us by Sardou, and finally it was done to please me. Painted a
soft green, with ivy growing over it, and a fountain flanked by white
marbles outlined against it, this trellis represents (to me, at least)
my best work.

The _tapis vert_ occupies the greater part of the garden, and it is
bordered by gravel walks bordered in turn with white flowerbeds. Between
the walks and the walls there are the groups of trees, the statues with
green spaces about them, the masses of evergreen trees, and finally the
great trees that follow the lines of the wall. Indeed, the _tapis vert_
is like the aren