cribed it in her book.

January 15th.--The bills for my roses and bulbs and other last year's
horticultural indulgences were all on the table when I came down
to breakfast this morning. They rather frightened me. Gardening is
expensive, I find, when it has to be paid for out of one's own private
pin-money. The Man of Wrath does not in the least want roses, or
flowering shrubs, or plantations, or new paths, and therefore, he asks,
why should he pay for them? So he does not and I do, and I have to make
up for it by not indulging all too riotously in new clothes, which is no
doubt very chastening. I certainly prefer buying new rose-trees to new
dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and I see a time coming when
the passion for my garden will have taken such a hold on me that I shall
not only entirely cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell those
that I already have. The garden is so big that everything has to be
bought wholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to go on much longer
with only one man and a stork, because the more I plant the more there
will be to water in the inevitable drought, and the watering is a
serious consideration when it means going backwards and forwards all day
long to a pump near the house, with a little water-cart. People living
in England, in almost perpetual mildness and moisture, don't really know
what a drought is. If they have some weeks of cloudless weather, it is
generally preceded and followed by good rains; but we have perhaps an
hour's shower every week, and then comes a month or six weeks' drought.
The soil is very light, and dries so quickly that, after the heaviest
thunder-shower, I can walk over any of my paths in my thin shoes; and to
keep the garden even moderately damp it should pour with rain regularly
every day for three hours. My only means of getting water is to go to
the pump near the house, or to the little stream that forms my eastern
boundary, and the little stream dries up too unless there has been rain,
and is at the best of times difficult to get at, having steep banks
covered with forget-me-nots. I possess one moist, peaty bit of ground,
and that is to be planted with silver birches in imitation of the
Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between the birches with flaming
azaleas. All the rest of my soil is sandy--the soil for pines and
acacias, but not the soil for roses; yet see what love will do--there
are more roses in my garden than any other flower! Next