Norma smiled up at the plain-faced woman and Mrs. James showed her satisfaction at the way Norma was accepted by their hostess. The other girls who had gone to Nancy Sherman’s had not yet returned to the Tompkins house, so the three flower lovers sat on the narrow front piazza and waited for them.
Twilight had given way to grey evening, and the frogs began croaking, and the little lizards chirping over in the meadow across the road as the three friends sat and talked of various things pertaining to floriculture.
“If you find the soil in any section of your garden of a clay nature, you will need to lighten it. Sand generally needs rich farm yard manure to strengthen it. This must be dug under and well mixed for about two feet in depth. As I said a while back, it is too late in the season to make use of farm yard composts of any kind, unless you use it in the water with which you soak the plants after sundown, at night. I keep a hogshead of water in a back corner of my garden, in which I soak manure from the barn yard and stalls. I add a small quantity of the compost to this water every time I add water in any quantity. This keeps it always at about the same degree of nourishment.”
“We have a few lily-of-the-valley plants along the side of the house where the driveway comes in. But they do not seem to be thriving,” said Mrs. James. “Can you tell me what to give them?”
“That’s because they are in the wrong location; now they are facing the southern sun and are exposed to the rays as well as to all the air that reaches the piazza. You must dig them up this fall, Mrs. James, and place them in a shady northeast bed. Plant them on that northeast side of the house where the stone wall sticks out like a buttress. I never knew why that freak of an out-thrust was there. But now I know why it is there—to protect and shade your lily-of-the-valley plants.”
Norma and Mrs. James smiled at this interpretation, and Mrs. Tompkins continued: “It would be a pity if Norma had to go back to the city before she had had time to plant her bulbs for next year’s flowers. The daffodils, tulips, crocuses, hyacinths and other bulbs, which need fall or early winter planting, and the hardy vines and shrubs which beautify a place so wonderfully, have to be planted in the fall when the sap is all out of the wood.”
“Mrs. Tompkins, do you think I could ever grow such lovely flowers at Green Hill, as you have back there in your gardens?” asked Norma, yearningly.
“Why not? Perhaps better ones; for you have soil, right exposures and finer surroundings than I ever had here at Four Corners. You must understand that plants are living things and they really appreciate their environment as much as we do. But the most important factor with them is the warmth of creative love—not the mortal selfish kind, but the divine eternal unselfish love. That is why you read of a scraggy little plant half-dead in the pot, that began to revive and flourish when cared for by a bed-ridden child whose days were passed in a tenement cellar. That plant needed not the sunshine and air of nature, as much as the beams of love and devotion and sacrifice from a human soul.”
“When you visit us at Green Hill, Mrs. Tompkins, I am going to show you an eye-sore that spreads all the way from the barn yard end of the farm to the road that runs past the northeast corner of the property. Perhaps you can suggest a remedy for that disgrace,” said Mrs. James earnestly.
“There is no ill in Nature. It is what man makes of his opportunity. I know the spot you speak of, and I often wished I had the right to go in there and work my will in that depression.”