the garden party

I've been obsessively reading Katherine Mansfield's short story The Garden-Party to keep going.

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. 

And, to continue with the theme, something from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

There was music from my neighbour's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

I wouldn't plan anything quite as extravagant, but flowers and watermelon and jam jars with little candles in them - that I could do and will do, once the season creeps in.