The height of our game was in autumn.

It is such a good time for digging up, and planting, and dividing, and making cuttings, and gathering seeds, and sowing them too.

But it went by very quickly, and when the leaves began to fall they fell very quickly, and Arthur never had to go up the trees and shake them.
After the first hard frost we quite gave up playing at the Earthly Paradise; first, because there was nothing we could do, and, secondly, because a lot of snow fell; and Arthur had a grand idea of making-snow statues all along the terrace, so that Mother could see them from the drawing-room windows.

We worked very hard, and it was very difficult to manage legs without breaking; so we made most of them Romans in togas, and they looked very well from a distance, and lasted a long time, because the frost lasted.
And, by degrees, I almost forgot that terrible afternoon in Mary's Meadow.

Only when Saxon came to see us I told him that I was very glad that no one understood his bark, so that he could not let out what had become of the hose-in-hose.
But when the winter was past, and the snow-drops came out in the shrubbery, and there were catkins on the nut trees, and the missel-thrush we had been feeding in the frost sat out on mild days and sang to us, we all of us began to think of our gardens again, and to go poking about "with our noses in the borders," as Arthur said, "as if we were dogs snuffing after truffles." What we really were "snuffing after" were the plants we had planted in autumn, and which were poking and sprouting, and coming up in all directions.
Arthur and Harry did real gardening in the Easter holidays, and they captured Adela now and then, and made her weed.