A narrator remembers a lively family who brought a provincial, slightly Welsh atmosphere to a suburban street, sketching their overloaded house, eccentric collections, faithful servant Ann, and a three-acre garden called the Wilderness centred on a pond with lilies and carp. The household's small tragedies and pleasures include the mysterious drowning of a girl and the later loss of trees and the pond to development. A cast of neighbours and acquaintances—cheerful and respectable figures, poets, outlaws, and boys—populate episodic chapters that mix local anecdote, landscape description, and quiet reflections on memory, change, and belonging.