"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 buttercups, 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.