She scanned my box of empty seed envelopes. “Oh, dear, the giant comets are mixed,” she said. “But”–with a look at the catalogue–“the débutantes are white. They grow only a foot and a half, but they are white.”
“Well, they’ll have to fox trot round the dial, then,” said I.
I dug them up, and we put them in clumps in the irregularities on the outside edges of the beds, first filling the holes part full of water, as I had seen Mike do with the cauliflower plants.
“Let me do some,” she pleaded. “Here I’ve been reading the old catalogue all the morning, while you’ve been digging in the nice dirt.”
She kneeled on the board, holding a plant caressingly in her hand, and with her naked fingers set it and firmed it in the moist earth. Then she set a second, and a third, holding up her grimy fingers gleefully.
“Oh, you nice earth!” she finally exclaimed, digging both hands eagerly in to the wrists.
After dinner we spaded up little beds at the foot of each pillar of the rose arch, and put flowers in each of them, facing the house, set a row of Phlox Drummondi along the line where the grape arbour was to be, to mark more clearly the western edge of the lawn, and finally took a load of the remaining seedlings, of various sorts, down to the brook, just below the orchard, where I planned some day to build a pool and develop a lovely garden nook. Here the soil was black and rich for a foot or more in depth, and after spading and raking out the weeds and grasses we had four little beds, though roughly and hastily made, two on each side of the stream, with the future pool, as it were, in the centre. These we filled with the remaining seedlings, helter skelter, just for a splash of colour, and watered from the brook itself.
Then we straightened our stiff backs, and scurried for shelter from the coming rain. We reached Bert’s just as the first big drops began to fall.
“Nice rain!” she cried, turning to look at it from under the porch. “You’ll give all the flowers a drink, and they’ll live and be beautiful in the garden of Twin Fires.”
“Do you like flowers as well as philology, really?” I asked.