Her Favourite Flying Visitors

Reminds me of the poem by Kipling 'The Glory of the Garden'

Thank you very much Janet for telling me about that poem. I looked it up and Kipling was definitely writing about the way things were! The poem makes me think of a rather regal elderly lady whose garden my husband used to tend in the 1970s. We had a tied cottage (I did her housework) and did rather feel we were "servants". She had grown up on a large country estate where there had been twelve gardeners and yes, she used to say that they were expected to do everything Kipling describes in the poem but do it invisibly - and silently, just as he says too. So having a magnificent garden was achieved by a small army of men and boys nipping in and out of the shadows, never sullying the view of the owner or his guests wandering through the lawned closes and among the herbaceous borders. And then WW1 came along, and the gardeners and garden boys went off to war and many of them never came back, and large stately gardens like hers ended up being cared for by a solitary gardener working his socks off. My husband and I worked together as organic gardeners in a big 4-acre walled garden in Southern Ireland, very like the one in my painting, but with rather more weeds in it!!!