Bel's Rooftop Garden
1 inch scale
Outside the window of the sitting-room there was a flat roof with a stone
coping all round it. When Bel first came to London she had put a few
pot-plants on this roof but this had not satisfied her craving for a garden, so
she bought some window boxes and a couple of stone troughs and filled them with
seedlings. Gradually, in spite of the soot and the smoke and the depredations
of pigeons, the flat roof had become a tiny garden, a piece of the country
wedged in amongst the bricks and mortar of the city. Some plants refused to
grow, they pined for their proper milieu as Bel herself had pined, but others
consented to bloom quite cheerfully. They had to be coaxed, of course, watered
and drained and re-potted, their leaves sponged and their roots cosseted with
bone-meal, but Bel had no other hobby and when she returned from working all
day in a stuffy office it was delightful to climb out of her sitting-room
window and enjoy the pleasance which she had created. The little garden was
wonderfully private, it was not overlooked by the windows of the surrounding
houses; she could take a deck-chair and sit there enjoying the colour and
fragrance of her flowers. She could see the sky, blue and hazy above the
chimneys; often she sat and watched the sky darken and the stars appear.
D. E.
Stevenson,
Bel Lamington, 1961
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