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The story begins with a description of a flowerbed, the vantage point from which the story is told. It consists of oval-shaped flowers that have heart- or tongue-shaped leaves containing red, blue, and yellow spots on them. The straight bar in the center of a flower is covered with gold dust. The summer breeze moves the flowers, creating a colorful pattern on the ground, reflected by objects such as pebbles and raindrops. The sun also lights up the fibers below a leaf, spreading the light under its green surface. The breeze blows, “flashing” these colors in the air, creating a spectacular view for the people out for a stroll in Kew Gardens.
Four sets of people pass the flower bed at different times. Each set has an “irregular” manner of walking that Woolf compares to the zig-zag pattern of white and blue butterflies flying from one flower to another. The first set appears, a man and a woman named Simon and Eleanor. Simon walks slightly ahead of Eleanor and seems lost in his thoughts, as if he does not want them disturbed. Eleanor, on the other hand, walks “with greater purpose,” looking back at times to see if their children, Caroline and Hubert, are keeping up.
The narrator reveals Simon’s thoughts. He recalls a day fifteen years earlier when he sat in the garden with someone named Lily, begging her to marry him. He recalls details of that moment, such as a dragonfly circling around them and the movement of the square silver buckle of Lily’s shoe as she bounced her toe, rejecting his proposal. His love for her had been like the circling dragonfly, and he had imagined that if the dragonfly landed on a leaf with a red flower, Lily would accept his proposal. The dragonfly never landed. Now, in retrospect, Simon seems thankful for the rejection, and he asks Eleanor if she ever reminisces about the past. He tells her that he has been thinking about Lily.
Eleanor tells him that she too reminisces about the past, as it is a natural thing to do, especially when one is in a garden with people and nature around. She describes the people in memories as ghosts from the past, and she shares her own memory. She tells him of the day when an old woman with a wart on her nose kissed her neck as Eleanor painted water lilies. The kiss had such impact that she was unable to concentrate on her painting. She tells him that she noted the time of the kiss because it “was so precious,” permitting herself only five minutes to think of that one moment. She calls to the children, and the four of them depart the scene.
