V

Larkspurs and Hollyhocks

"Jonathan, let's not have a garden."

"What'll we live on if we don't?"

"Oh, of course, I don't mean that kind of a garden,--peas and potatoes and things,-- I mean flowers. Let's not have a flower garden."

"That seems easy enough to manage," he ruminated; "the hard thing would be to have one."

"I know. And what's the use? There are always flowers enough, all around us, from May till October. Let's just enjoy them."

"I always have."

I looked at him to detect a possible sarcasm in the words, but his face was innocent.

"Well, of course, so have I. But what I mean is--people when they have a country place seem to spend such a lot of energy doing things for themselves that nature is doing for them just over the fence. There was Christabel Vincent last summer, grubbing over yellow lilies, or something, and I went over into the meadow and got a lovely armful of lilies and brought them in, and no grubbing at all."

"Perhaps grubbing was what she was after," said Jonathan.

"Well, anyway, she talked as if it was lilies."

"I don't know that that matters," he said.

Jonathan is sometimes so acute about my friends that it is almost annoying.

This conversation was one of many that occurred the winter before we took up the farm. We went up in April that year, and we planted our corn and our potatoes and all the rest, but no flowers. That part we left to nature, and she responded most generously. From earliest spring until October--nay, November--we were never without flowers: brave little white saxifrage and hepaticas, first of all, then bloodroot and arbutus, adder's-tongue and columbine, shad-blow and dogwood, and all the beloved throng of them, at our feet and overhead. In May the pink azalea and the b.u.t.tercups, in June the laurel and the daisies and--almost best of all--the dear clover. In summer the deep woods gave us orchids, and the open meadows lilies and black-eyed Susans. In September the river-banks and the brooks glowed for us with cardinal-flower and the blue lobelia, and then, until the frosts settled into winter, there were the fringed gentians and the asters and the goldenrod. And still the half has not been told. If I tried to name all that gay company, my tale would be longer than Homer's catalogue of the ships.

In early July a friend brought me in a big bunch of sweet peas. I buried my face in their sweetness; then, as I held them off, I sighed.

"Oh, dear!" I said.

"What's 'oh, dear'?" said Jonathan, as he took off his ankle-clips. He had just come up from the station on his bicycle.

"Nothing. Only why do people have magenta sweet peas with red ones and pink ones--that special pink? It's just the color of pink tooth-powder."

"You might throw away the ones you don't like."

"No, I can't do that. But why does anybody grow them? If I had sweet peas, I'd have white ones, and pale lavender ones, and those lovely salmon-pink ones, and maybe some pale yellow ones--"

"Sweet peas have to be planted in March," said Jonathan, as he trundled his wheel off toward the barn.

"Of course," I called after him, "I'm not _going_ to plant any. I was only saying _if_."

Perhaps the sweet peas began it, but I really think the whole thing began with the phlox.

One afternoon in August I walked down the road through the woods to meet Jonathan. As he came up to me and dismounted I held out to him a spray of white phlox.

"Where do you suppose I found it?" I asked.

"Down by the old Talcott place," he hazarded.

"No. There is some there, but this was growing under our crab-apple trees, right beside the house."

"Well, now, it must have been some of Aunt Deborah's. I remember hearing Uncle Ben say she used to have her garden there; that must have been before he started the crab orchard. Why, that phlox can't be less than forty years old, anyway."

"Dear me!" I took back the delicate spray; "it doesn't look it."

"No. Don't you wish you could look like that when you're forty?" he philosophized; and added, "Is there much of it?"

"Five or six roots, but there won't be many blossoms, it's so shady."

"We might move it and give it a chance."

"Let's! We'll dig it up this fall, and put it over on the south side of the house, in that sunny open place."

When October came, we took Aunt Deborah's phlox and transplanted it to where it could get the sunshine it had been starving for all those years. I sat on a stump and watched Jonathan digging the holes.

"You don't suppose Henry will cut them down for weeds when they come up, do you?" I said.

"Seems probable," said Jonathan. "You might stick in a few bulbs that'll come up early and mark the spot."

"Oh, yes. And we could put a line of sweet alyssum along each side, to last along after the bulbs are over."

"You can do that in the spring if you want to. I'll bring up some bulbs to-morrow."

The winter pa.s.sed and the spring came--sweet, tormenting.

"Jonathan," I said at luncheon one day, "I got the sweet alyssum seed this morning.

"Sweet alyssum?" He looked blank. "What do you want sweet alyssum for?

It's a foolish flower. I thought you weren't going to have a garden, anyway."

"I'm not; but don't you remember about the phlox? We said we'd put in some sweet alyssum to mark it--so it wouldn't get cut down."

"The bulbs will do that, and when they're gone it will be high enough to show."

"Well, I have the seed, and I might as well use it. It won't do any harm."