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But the back of Plasencia had another glory—its superb herbaceous border, which, waving banners of the same hues, only brighter, marched boldly into the view, and became one with it. Now in September it was stiffened by annuals: dahlias, astors, snapdragon, sunflowers; Californian poppies whose whiteness—at any rate in the red poppyland of East Anglia—always seems exotic, miraculous, suggesting the paradoxical chemical action of the Blood of the Lamb. There were also great clumps of violas, with petals of so faint a shade of blue or yellow that every line of their black tracery stood out clear and distinct, and which might have been the handiwork of some delicate-minded and deft-fingered old maid, expressing her dreams and heart’s ease in a Cathedral city a hundred years ago. As to herbaceous things proper, there was St. John’s wort, catmint, borrage, sage; their stalks grown so long and thick, their blossoms so big and brave, that old Gerard would have been hard put to see in them his familiars—the herbs that, like guardian angels, drew down from the stars the virtue for the homely offices of easing the plough-boy’s toothache, the beldame’s ague.