In the 1950s the garden took over its own management. The more delicate Cecil Brunner and Dainty Bess succumbed to black spot, but the Seven Sisters grew into a mat over the sundial and the Lady Banksia climbed out of the garden and up into the tops of the pine trees. The ferns choked out the pickerelweed, and a race of giant black-and-red grasshoppers bred in the Ophiopogon borders.

Eva, one of the tea-drinking granddaughters, had inherited her grandmother’s interest in botany, without the sentiment, and made a serious study of several species of indigenous rice. One summer Eva dug out the ferns that had taken over the half-acre bog behind the pool and planted rows of little rice plants there. It was a constant struggle to keep the ferns from taking back the bog, but in one year the rice grew to towering clumps. In the fall Eva gathered a bushel of it, shaking the grains out of the drooping heads. But she found it almost impossible to separate the grain from the husk. The winnowing method she set up on the porch with screen wire and a fan wasn’t up to it. The husk, with its sharp, little backward-facing barbs clung tenaciously to the grain, and it needed many picking fingers to do the job. But Eva’s children were no more interested in hulling rice than Eva herself had been at their age in Victorian tea parties, and the rice clumps went unharvested in the bog behind the garden, reseeding themselves year after year.

In the fall of 1968, Eva’s son Louis went off to college and came home for his spring break with a new enthusiasm for gardening and many questions for Eva about the pH scale and dolomite lime. He spent days behind the garden, putting in drains and digging manures into the old rice field. On a hot afternoon in early September he took Eva for a walk through the old overgrown garden.

“I want to show you something,” he told her.

They stopped behind the rubble-strewn grot, and Eva looked out over what used to be her rice plantation. “What is that?” she said. “Palmate leaves, edges dentate—it reminds me of rose of Sharon, but this square stem, like a mint. An odd smell for a plant, and these dense, gummy flower clusters. What are you growing here, Louis?”

“It’s not rose of Sharon.” Then Louis showed her his drying racks in the grot, and together they snipped off several bristling bundles of flowers. They sat on a bench near the roses and Louis rolled a thin, little yellow cigarette.