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 spring the bare places are to be filled with trees that I have ordered:
pines behind the delicate acacias, and startling mountain-ashes, oaks,
copper-beeches, maples, larches, juniper-trees--was it not Elijah
who sat down to rest under a juniper-tree? I have often wondered
how he managed to get under it.
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