That winter she planted two little tea-olive trees at the entrance to the garden, and the rose plot from the poem—Lady Banksia, Dainty Bess, Cecil Brunner, and Seven Sisters around a bronze sundial.

The next summer was rainy, but she dug a round hole in the mud and planted pickerelweed around the edge, and that was the fringed pool.

The next spring, her skills in cement honed by the work she had done the year before lining the pool in the drizzling rain, she tackled the ferned grot and ended up in September with a slumping concrete dome with arched openings on four sides, studded with broken conch shells she’d picked up at the Gulf. “Like fossils from an ancient seabed,” she told them intently, brushing the sand from her fingers in little twiddling motions.

The ferns began to thicken and spread, the roses bloomed, and the tea-olive trees were shoulder high. Nana laid little flagstone paths in artistic curves connecting the different features of the garden, bordered with Ophiopogon, and organized garden tea parties for her granddaughters. She dressed them up in white lawn and black stockings and tried to get them to assume graceful poses on the sloping concrete benches in the ferned grot, teacup in one hand, saucer in the other. But mosquitoes swarmed out of the fringed pool, the black wool stockings were prickly and tight, and they didn’t like hot tea.

“My God, woman,” their grandfather roared down from the house. “What the hell is a grot?”

Then the tea party was over, cups hastily set down with relief, mosquito bites scratched at last, and one granddaughter poked her sister and whispered, “God wot!” With a chorus of giggles the granddaughters trooped back to the house, ignoring the graceful curving path and stomping over the Ophiopogon border. And Nana, in tears, was left to gather up the pieces of a broken cup.

Years went by; the tea-olive trees grew up and formed a canopy over the garden entrance, and the ferns took off and spread into the bog behind the garden formed by the leaky pool. In the 1940s the roof collapsed on the grot and it actually took on the look of some kind of ruin. Nana became more and more a figure of fun to her family as she aged. “God wot” evolved in the family linguistics into an expletive, and surrounded as she was by irreverent loved ones, Nana’s sanity began to ebb. She was always brushing imaginary grains of sand off her fingers, and she thought that flowers were in bloom out of season.

“Oh, dearest!” she would gush on a dreary January afternoon, gesturing with twiddling fingers to the bleak, stubbly lawn, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, dearest…the lilies!”

“God wot, woman!” her husband would growl, glaring at her from under his bushy eyebrows. “Can’t you see it’s the dead of winter? Ain’t no lilies blooming out of that cold ground!”