Explore "A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip" by Edward S. Sorenson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Our boarding-house had a narrow side verandah, which was so crowded with plants in pots and tubs and tins that there was barely room for a person to walk along the edge of it. You brushed the staghorn fern going into the dining-room; the herring-bone fern threatened to go with you into your bedroom; and "mind the magnolias, please," was the sweet injunction of the old lady when two or three of us stepped outside together.
That pathetic little garden directed our attention to a host of similar plots else where.