Britta's Letters from her life divided between city-life in German's capital Berlin and life in a Bavarian village

Monday 22 April 2013

The Weeding Cultivator - Quote from E.F.Benson's "Queen Lucia"


Britta Huegel


"A yew hedge, bought entire from a neighboring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth and indignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of garden from the road, and cast monstrous shadows of the shapes into which it was cut, across the little lawn inside. Here, as was only right and proper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare; indeed it was called Shakespeare's garden, and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining room was Ophelia's border, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that distraught maiden distributed to her friends when she should have been in a lunatic asylum. Mrs. Lucas often reflected how lucky it was that such institutions were unknown in Elizabeth's day, or that if known, Shakespeare artistically ignored their existence. Pansies, naturally, formed the chief decoration - though there were some very flourishing plants of rue. Mrs Lucas always wore a little bunch of them when in flower, to inspire her thoughts, and found them wonderfully efficacious. Round the sundial, which was set in the middle of one of the squares of grass between which a path of broken paving stone led to the front door, was a circular border, now, in July, sadly vacant, for it harbored only the spring flowers enumerated by Perdita. But the first day every year when Perdita's border put forth its earliest blossom was a delicious anniversary, and the news of it spread like wildfire through Mrs. Lucas' kingdom, and her subjects were very joyful, and came to salute the violet or daffodil, or whatever it was."

3 comments:

  1. I think hard about changing it from riddle to quotation :-)

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  2. Perdita, Mrs Lucas.....I'm wracking my memory!

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  3. Dear Pondside,
    I thought so :-)
    I imagined that you might get bored by playing solitaire, sometimes mumbling contemptuously: "Elementary, my dear Watson." So I am almost determined to change from riddle to quote.

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