There is an osier chair in one room wherein I often sit and watch the buyers flit from plant to plant. The women who come from the British Isles choose primroses, while those of Ontario and the other provinces to the south, prefer a lilac in bloom, marguerites, or carnations—anything they knew and loved at home.
The Fraus, Madames, and Senoritas from Europe (every one must have a blossom for Easter, else where is luck to hail from?) are better satisfied with heliotropes, azaleas, and claret-coloured cyclamens.
Our erstwhile teacher places the Norway pines close under the palms; the tree of shade and the tree of sun that sigh vainly for each other. I like him for this. He knows that Titiana loved Bottom. He must know it.
Very few care for my favourite flower—the narcissus. I always buy it, and a fern. There are folk who despise ferns because they are nothing but leaves but I like them for their history. They are the survival of the fittest; types which Nature, in her great printing-press, never breaks up. They are the old-timers of the vegetable world.
Also, I walk down the tomato avenue and take my pick—that is I do if I have enough money, for, here, at the edge of the world, they are as expensive as Jacob's mess of pottage. One does not dream of robbing banks so much as stripping tomato-vines.
Tomatoes do not ripen out of doors (but you must not tell the Board of Trade I said so) unless on a sunny slope, or by reason of some other special dispensation.
Other vegetables thrive, and the cauliflowers attain a size and perfection elsewhere undreamed of.
Never were there such toothsome red radishes as are grown here in the north, large, firm, and flavorous. They are not so big, though, as the radishes the Jews used to raise long ago of which it was said a fox and her cubs could burrow in the hollow of one. I have, however, seen a pumpkin large enough for a fox-warren, but candour compels the confession that the gardener fed it daily with milk by means of an incision which he made in its stalk.
Our strawberries are not the equal of those grown on the Pacific slope, but are larger, sweeter and firmer than Ontario berries.
We do not sit under our own fig-tree (nor, alas, our apple-tree), but why should we sigh when each summer the sunflower springs up to a height of twelve or fifteen feet? It is the palm-tree of the north, only more beautiful.