Edwardian and Georgian Canadian Poets
1900-1930

 

 


Canadian Houses
of Romance

by

Katherine Hale




XXV

A POET’S GARDEN

LANGARAVINE, the home of a well loved poet of Vancouver, Mrs. J. M. LeFevre, stood with open doors on an August afternoon. The doors are often open, for it is a house of many friendships. Its short history is beauty.
     From a flagged terrace at its rear, you reach the garden. Below this terrace lies another one of grass, then lawns, and, at their fartherest edge, turquoise of ocean, and beyond that the deeper blue of hills. There is a Japanese tea house near the cliff’s edge, and after tea, there is the cliff’s edge itself, where you look over a low stone wall far out to jade-green distance where the Islands lie—many, small, difficult of access; where all sorts of people are living their remote lives, cut off by sorcery of the sea from the modern world.
     The eastern boundary of this garden is a deep ravine. On the other side of the lawns there are water gardens, with wax-white lilies, wide awake. And deeper still an old skid-road,—early British Columbia—left untouched at the garden’s edge. Bluebells mount jauntily up the old skid-road.
     Beneath the terrace late roses were still in bloom and the faintest, sweetest flower scent in the world, that of midsummer phlox, came from the gardens [page 200] below. Fuchsia trees were in flower, magnolias lingered, and California poppies—romnia—grew in thick shrubs, as pale as ghosts…Through the drawingroom windows there came the distant sound of strings, and, when the music stopped, there was poetry read from an ivied balcony about the terrace.
     It might have happened long ago in Italy—the blue skies and sea, the music of strings, scent of roses and sound of poetry: a traditional sequence perfectly understood by nations more childlike, and much more sophisticated than our own…But fortunately it was not Italy; it was Canada. [page 201]


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