Ethel Morton's Enterprise

CHAPTER VI

Roger had a fair crop of lettuce in one of his flats by the middle of March and transplanted the tiny, vivid green leaves to the hotbed without doing them any harm. The celery and tomato seeds that he had planted during the first week of the month were showing their heads bravely and the cabbage and cauliflower seedlings had gone to keep the lettuce company in the hotbed. On every warm day he opened the sashes and let the air circulate among the young plants.

"Wordsworth says

and I suppose that's true of vegetables, too," laughed Roger.

The girls, meanwhile, had been planting the seeds of Canterbury bells and foxgloves in flats. They did not put in many of them because they learned that they would not blossom until the second year. The flats they made from boxes that had held tomato cans. Roger sawed through the sides and they used the cover for the bottom of the second flat.

The dahlias they provided with pots, joking at the exclusiveness of this gorgeous flower which likes to have a separate house for each of its seeds. These were to be transferred to the garden about the middle of May together with the roots of last year's dahlias which they were going to sprout in a box of sand for about a month before allowing them to renew their acquaintance with the flower bed.

By the middle of April they had planted a variety of seeds and were watching the growth or awaiting the germination of gay cosmos, shy four o'clocks, brilliant marigolds, varied petunias and stocks, smoke-blue ageratums, old-fashioned pinks and sweet williams. Each was planted according to the instructions of the seed catalogues, and the young horticulturists also read and followed the advice of the pamphlets on "Annual Flowering Plants" and "The Home Vegetable Garden" sent out by the Department of Agriculture at Washington to any one who asks for them.

They were prudent about planting directly in the garden seeds which did not require forcing in the house, for they did not want them to be nipped, but they put them in the ground just as early as any of the seedsmen recommended, though they always saved a part of their supply so that they might have enough for a second sowing if a frost should come.

Certain flowers which they wished to have blossom for a long time they sowed at intervals. Candytuft, for instance, they sowed first in April and they planned to make a second sowing in May and a third late in July so that they might see the pretty white border blossoms late in the autumn. Mignonette was a plant of which Mr. Emerson was as fond as Roger was of sweetpeas and the girls decided to give him a surprise by having such a succession of blooms that they might invite him to a picking bee as late as the end of October. Nasturtiums also, they planted with a liberal hand in nooks and crannies where the soil was so poor that they feared other plants would turn up their noses, and pansies, whose demure little faces were favorites with Mrs. Morton, they experimented with in various parts of the gardens and in the hotbed.

The gardens at the Mortons' and Smiths' were long established so that there was not any special inducement to change the arrangement of the beds, except as the young people had planned way back in January for the enlargement of the drying green. The new garden, however, offered every opportunity. Each bed was laid out with especial reference to the crop that was to be put into it and the land was naturally so varied that there was the kind of soil and the right exposure for plants that required much moisture and for those that preferred a sandy soil, for the sun lovers and the shade lovers.

The newly aroused interest in plants extended to the care of the house plants which heretofore had been the sole concern of Mrs. Emerson and Mrs. Morton. Now the girls begged the privilege of trimming off the dead leaves from the ivies and geraniums and of washing away with oil of lemon and a stiff brush the scale that sometimes came on the palms. They even learned to kill the little soft white creature called aphis by putting under the plant a pan of hot coals with tobacco thrown on them.

"It certainly has a sufficiently horrid smell," exclaimed Ethel Brown. "I don't wonder the beasties curl up and die; I'd like to myself."

"They say aphis doesn't come on a plant with healthy sap," Ethel Blue contributed to this talk, "so the thing to do is to make these plants so healthy that the animals drop off starved."

"This new development is going to be a great comfort to me if it keeps on," Mrs. Emerson confessed to her daughter humorously. "I shall encourage the girls to use my plants for instruction whenever they want to."

"You may laugh at their sudden affection," returned Mrs. Morton seriously, "but I've noticed that everything the U.S.C. sets its heart on doing gets done, and I've no doubt whatever that they'll have what Roger calls 'some' garden this next summer."

"Roger has had long consultations with his grandfather about fertilizers and if he's interested in the beginnings of a garden and not merely in the results I think we can rely on him."

"They have all been absorbed in the subject for three months and now

Roger maintained that his Aunt Louise's house ought to be begun at the time that he planted his sweetpeas.

"If I can get into the ground enough to plant, surely the cellar diggers ought to be able to do the same," he insisted.

March was not over when he succeeded in preparing a trench a foot deep all around the spot which was to be his vegetable garden except for a space about three feet wide which he left for an entrance. In the bottom he placed three inches of manure and over that two inches of good soil. In this he planted the seeds half an inch apart in two rows and covered them with soil to the depth of three inches, stamping it down hard. As the vines grew to the top of the trench he kept them warm with the rest of the earth that he had taken out, until the opening was entirely filled.

The builder was not of Roger's mind about the cellar digging, but he really did begin operations in April. Every day the Mortons and Smiths, singly or in squads, visited the site of Sweetbrier Lodge, as Mrs. Smith and Dorothy had decided to call the house. Dorothy had started a notebook in which to keep account of the progress of the new estate, but after the first entry—"Broke ground to-day"—matters seemed to advance so slowly that she had to fill in with memoranda concerning the growth of the garden.

Even before the house was started its position and that of the garage had been staked so that the garden might not encroach on them. Then the garden had been laid out with a great deal of care by the united efforts of the Club and Mr. Emerson and his farm superintendent.

Often the Ethels and Dorothy extended their walk to the next field and to the woods and rocks at the back. The Clarks had learned nothing more about their Cousin Emily, although they had a man searching records and talking with the older people of a number of towns in Nebraska. He reported that he was of the opinion that either the child had died when young or that she had moved to a considerable distance from the town of her birth or that she had been adopted and had taken the name of her foster parents. At any rate consultation of records of marriages and deaths in several counties had revealed to him no Emily Leonard.

The Clarks were quite as depressed by this outcome of the search as was Mrs. Smith, but they had instructed the detective to continue his investigation. Meanwhile they begged Dorothy and her cousins to enjoy the meadow and woods as much as they liked.

The warm moist days of April tempted the girls to frequent searches for wild flowers. They found the lot a very gold mine of delight. There was so much variety of soil and of sunshine and of shadow that plants of many different tastes flourished where in the meadow across the road only a few kinds seemed to live. It was with a hearty shout they hailed the first violets.

"Here they are, here they are!" cried Ethel Blue. "Aunt Marion said she was sure she saw some near the brook. She quoted some poetry about it—

"That's pretty; what's the rest of it?" asked Ethel Brown, on her knees taking up some of the plants with her trowel and placing them in her basket so carefully that there was plenty of earth surrounding each one to serve as a nest when it should be put into Helen's wild flower bed.

"It's about something good happening when everything seems very bad," explained Ethel Blue. "Browning wrote it."

"It's always so, isn't it!" approved Dorothy. "And the more we think about the silver lining to every cloud the more likely it is to show itself."

"What's this delicate white stuff? And these tiny bluey eyes?" asked Ethel Blue, who was again stooping over to examine the plants that enjoyed the moist positions near the stream.

"The eyes are houstonia—Quaker ladies. We must have a clump of them. Saxifrage, Helen said the other was. She called my attention the other day to some they had at school to analyze. It has the same sort of stem that the hepatica has."

"I remember—a scape—only this isn't so downy."

"They're pretty, aren't they? We must be sure to get a good sized patch; you can't see them well enough when there is only a plant or two."

"Helen wants a regular village of every kind that she transplants. She says she'd rather have a good many of a few kinds than a single plant of ever so many kinds."

"It will be prettier. What do you suppose this yellow bell-shaped flower is?"

"It ought to be a lily, hanging its head like that."

"It is a lily," corroborated Ethel Brown, "but it's called 'dog-tooth violet' though it isn't a violet at all."

"What a queer mistake. Hasn't it any other name?"

"Adder's-tongue. That's more suitable, isn't it?"

"Yes, except that I hate to have a lovely flower called by a snake's name!"

"Not all snakes are venomous; and, anyway, we ought to remember that every animal has some means of protecting himself and the snakes do it through their poison fangs."

"Or through their squeezing powers, like that big constrictor we saw at the Zoo."

"I suppose it is fair for them to have a defence," admitted Ethel Blue, "but I don't like them, just the same, and I wish this graceful flower had some other name."

"It has."

"O, that! 'Dog-tooth' is just about as ugly as 'adder's tongue'! The botanists were in bad humor when they christened the poor little thing!"

"Do you remember what Bryant says about 'The Yellow Violet'?" asked Ethel Brown, who was always committing verses to memory.

"Tell us," begged Ethel Blue, who was expending special care on digging up this contribution to the garden as if to make amends for the unkindness of the scientific world, and Ethel Brown repeated the poem beginning

Dorothy went into ecstasies over the discovery of two roots of white violets, but there seemed to be no others, though they all sought diligently for the fragrant blossoms among the leaves.

A cry from Ethel Blue brought the others to a drier part of the field at a distance from the brook. There in a patch of soil that was almost sandy was a great patch of violets of palest hue, with deep orange eyes. They were larger than any of the other violets and their leaves were entirely different.

"What funny leaves," cried Dorothy. "They look as if some one had crumpled up a real violet leaf and cut it from the edge to the stem into a fine fringe."

"Turn it upside down and press it against the ground. Don't you think it looks like a bird's claw?"

"So it does! This must be a 'bird-foot violet,'"

"It is, and there's more meaning in the name than in the one the yellow bell suffers from. Do you suppose there are any violets up in the woods?"

"They seem to fit in everywhere; I shouldn't be a bit surprised if there were some there."

Sure enough, there were, smaller and darker in color than the flowers down by the brook and hiding more shyly under their shorter-stemmed leaves.

"Helen is going to have some trouble to make her garden fit the tastes of all these different flowers," said Ethel Brown thoughtfully. "I don't see how she's going to do it."

"Naturally it's sort of half way ground," replied Ethel Blue. "She can enrich the part that is to hold the ones that like rich food and put sand where these bird foot fellows are to go, and plant the wet-lovers at the end where the hydrant is so that there'll be a temptation to give them a sprinkle every time the hose is screwed on."

"The ground is always damp around the hydrant; I guess she'll manage to please her new tenants."

"If only Mother can buy this piece of land," said Dorothy, "I'm going to plant forget-me-nots and cow lilies and arum lilies right in the stream. There are flags and pickerel weed and cardinals here already. It will make a beautiful flower bed all the length of the field."

"I hope and hope every day that it will come out right," sighed Ethel Blue. "Of course the Miss Clarks are lovely about it, but you can't do things as if it were really yours."

Almost at the same instant both the Ethels gave a cry as each discovered a plant she had been looking for.

"Mine is wild ginger, I'm almost sure," exclaimed Ethel Brown. "Come and see, Dorothy."

"Has it a thick, leathery leaf that lies down almost flat?" asked Dorothy, running to see for herself.

"Yes, and a blossom you hardly notice. It's hidden under the leaves and it's only yellowish-green. You have to look hard for it."

"That must be wild ginger," Dorothy decided. "What's yours, Ethel Blue?"

"I know mine is hepatica. See the 'hairy scape' Helen talked about? And see what a lovely, lovely color the blossom is? Violet with a hint of pink?"

"That would be the best of all for a border. The leaves stay green all winter and the blossoms come early in the spring and encourage you to think that after a while all the flowers are going to awaken."

"It's a shame to take all this out of Dorothy's lot."

"It may never be mine," sighed Dorothy. "Still, perhaps we ought not to take too many roots; the Miss Clarks may not want all the flowers taken out of their woods."

"We'll take some from here and some from Grandfather's woods," decided Ethel Brown. "There are a few in the West Woods, too."

So they dug up but a comparatively small number of the hepaticas, nor did they take many of the columbines nodding from a cleft in the piled-up rocks.

"I know that when we have our wild garden fully planted I'm not going to want to pick flowers just for the sake of picking them the way I used to," confessed Ethel Blue. "Now I know something about them they seem so alive to me, sort of like people—I'm sure they won't like to be taken travelling and forced to make a new home for themselves."

"I know how you feel," responded Dorothy slowly. "I feel as if those columbines were birds that had perched on those rocks just for a minute and were going to fly away, and I didn't want to disturb them before they flitted."

They all stood gazing at the delicate, tossing blossoms whose spurred tubes swung in every gentlest breeze.

"It has a bird's name, too," added Dorothy as if there had been no silence; "aquilegia—the eagle flower."

"Why eagle? The eagle is a strenuous old fowl," commented Ethel Brown. "The name doesn't seem appropriate."

"It's because of the spurs—they suggest an eagle's talons."

"That's too far-fetched to suit me," confessed Ethel Brown.

"It is called 'columbine' because the spurs look a little like doves around a drinking fountain, and the Latin word for dove is 'columba," said Dorothy.

"It's queer the way they name flowers after animals—" said Ethel Blue.

"Or parts of animals," laughed her cousin. "Saxifrage isn't; Helen told me the name meant 'rock-breaker,' because some kinds grow in the clefts of rocks the way the columbines do."

"I wish we could find a trillium," said Ethel Blue. "The tri in that name means that everything about it is in threes."

"What is a trillium?" asked Ethel Brown.

"Roger brought in a handful the other day. 'Wake-robin' he called it."

"O, I remember them. There was a bare stalk with three leaves and the flower was under the leaves."

"There were three petals to the corolla and three sepals to the calyx. He had purple ones and white ones."

"Here's a white one this very minute," said Dorothy, pouncing upon a plant eight or ten inches in height whose leaves looked eager and strong.

"See," she said as they all leaned over to examine it; "the blossom has two sets of leaves. The outer set is usually green or some color not so gay as to attract insects or birds that might destroy the flower when it is in bud. These outer leaves are called, all together, the calyx, and each one of them is called a sepal."

"The green thing on the back of a rose is the calyx and each of its leaflets is called a sepal," said Ethel Brown by way of fixing the definition firmly in her mind.

"The pretty part of the flower is the corolla which means 'little crown,' and each of its parts is called a petal."

"How did you learn all that?" demanded Ethel Brown admiringly.

"Your grandmother told me the other day."

"You've got a good memory. Helen has told me a lot of botanical terms, but I forget them,"

"I try hard to remember everything I hear any one say about flowers or vegetables or planting now. You never can tell when it may be useful," and Dorothy nodded wisely.

"Shall we take up this wake-robin?" asked Ethel Blue.

"Let's not," pleaded Ethel Brown. "We shall find others somewhere and there's only one here."

They left it standing, but when they came upon a growth of wind-flowers there were so many of them that they did not hesitate to dig them freely.

"I wonder why they're called 'wind-flowers'?" queried Ethel Brown, whose curiosity on the subject of names had been aroused.

"I know that answer," replied Ethel Blue unexpectedly. "That is, nobody knows the answer exactly; I know that much."

The other girls laughed.

"What is the answer as far as anybody knows it?" demanded Dorothy.

"The scientific name is 'anemone.' It comes from the Greek word meaning 'wind.'"

"That seems to be a perfectly good answer. Probably it was given because they dance around so prettily in the wind," guessed Dorothy.

"Helen's botany says that it was christened that either because it grew in windy places or because it blossomed at the windy season."

"Dorothy's explanation suits me best," Ethel Brown decided. "I shall stick to that."

"I think it's prettiest myself," agreed Dorothy.

"She's so much in earnest she doesn't realize that she's deciding against famous botanists," giggled Ethel Brown.

"It is prettier—a lot prettier," insisted Ethel Blue. "I'm glad I've a cousin who can beat scientists!"

"What a glorious lot of finds!" cried Ethel Brown. "Just think of our getting all these in one afternoon!"

"I don't believe we could except in a place like this where any plant can have his taste suited with meadow or brookside or woods or rocks."

"And sunshine or shadow."

They were in a gay mood as they gathered up their baskets and trowels and gently laid pieces of newspaper over the uprooted plants.

"It isn't hot to-day but we won't run any risk of their getting a headache from the sun," declared Dorothy.

"These woodsy ones that aren't accustomed to bright sunshine may be sensitive to it," assented Ethel Blue. "We must remember to tell Helen in just what sort of spot we found each one so she can make its corner in the garden bed as nearly like it as possible."

"I'm going to march in and quote Shakespeare to her," laughed Ethel Brown. "I'm going to say

and then I'll describe the 'bank' so she can copy it."

"If she doesn't she may have to repeat Bryant's 'Death of the Flowers':—

CHAPTER VII

"Look out, Della; don't pick that! Don't pick that, it's poison ivy!" cried Ethel Brown as all the Club members were walking on the road towards Grandfather Emerson's. A vine with handsome glossy leaves reached an inviting cluster toward passers-by.

"Poison ivy!" repeated Della, springing back. "How do you know it is? I thought it was woodbine—Virginia creeper."

"Virginia creeper has as many fingers as your hand; this ivy has only three leaflets. See, I-V-Y," and Ethel Blue took a small stick and tapped a leaflet for each letter.

"I must tell Grandfather this is here," said Helen. "He tries to keep this road clear of it even if he finds it growing on land not his own. It's too dangerous to be so close to the sidewalk."

"It's a shame it behaves so badly when it's so handsome."

"It's not handsome if 'handsome is as handsome does' is true. But this is stunning when the leaves turn scarlet."

"It's a mighty good plan to admire it from a distance," decided Tom, who had been looking at it carefully. "Della and I being 'city fellers,' we're ignorant about it. I'll remember not to touch the three-leaved I-V-Y, from now on."

The Club was intent on finishing their flower garden plans that afternoon. They had gathered together all the seedsmen's catalogues that had been sent them and they had also accumulated a pile of garden magazines. They knew, however, that Mr. Emerson had some that they did not have, and they also wanted his help, so they had telephoned over to find out whether he was to be at home and whether he would help them with the laying out of their color beds.

"Nothing I should like better," he had answered cordially so now they were on the way to put him to the test.

"We already have some of our color plants in our gardens left over from last year," Helen explained, "and some of the others that we knew we'd want we've started in the hotbed, and we've sowed a few more in the open beds, but we want to make out a full list."

"Just what is your idea," asked Mr. Emerson, while Grandmother Emerson saw that the dining table around which they were sitting had on it a plentiful supply of whole wheat bread sandwiches, the filling being dates and nuts chopped together.

Helen explained their wish to have beds all of one color.

"We girls are so crazy over pink that we're going to try a pink bed at both of Dorothy's gardens as well as in ours," she laughed.

"You'd like a list of plants that will keep on blooming all summer so that you can always run out and get a bunch of pink blossoms, I suppose."

"That's exactly what we want," and they took their pencils to note down any suggestions that Mr. Emerson made.

"We've decided on pink candytuft for the border and single pink hollyhocks for the background with foxgloves right in front of them to cover up the stems at the bottom where they haven't many leaves and a medium height phlox in front of that for the same reason."

"You should have pink morning glories and there's a rambler rose, a pink one, that you ought to have in the southeast corner on your back fence," suggested Mr. Emerson. "Stretch a strand or two of wire above the top and let the vine run along it. It blooms in June."

"Pink rambler," they all wrote. "What's its name?"

"Dorothy—"

"Smith?"

"Perkins."

James went through a pantomime that registered severe disappointment.

"Suppose we begin at the beginning," suggested Mr. Emerson. "I believe we can make out a list that will keep your pink bed gay from May till frost."

"That's what we want."

"You had some pink tulips last spring."

"We planted them in the autumn so that they'd come out early this spring. By good luck they're just where we've decided to have a pink bed."

"There's your first flower, then. They're near the front of the bed, I hope. The low plants ought to be in front, of course, so they won't be hidden."

"They're in front. So are the hyacinths."

"Are you sure they're all pink?"

"It's a great piece of good fortune—Mother selected only pink bulbs and a few yellow ones to put back into the ground and gave the other colors to Grandmother."

"That helps you at the very start-off. There are two kinds of pinks that ought to be set near the front rank because they don't grow very tall—the moss pink and the old-fashioned 'grass pink.' They are charming little fellows and keep up a tremendous blossoming all summer long."

"'Grass pink,'" repeated Ethel, Brown, "isn't that the same as 'spice pink'?"

"That's what your grandmother calls it. She says she has seen people going by on the road sniff to see what that delicious fragrance was. I suppose these small ones must be the original pinks that the seedsmen have burbanked into the big double ones."

"'Burbanked'?"

"That's a new verb made out of the name of Luther Burbank, the man who has raised such marvelous flowers in California and has turned the cactus into a food for cattle instead of a prickly nuisance."

"I've heard of him," said Margaret. "'Burbanked' means 'changed into something superior,' I suppose."

"Something like that. Did you tell me you had a peony?"

There's a good, tall tree peony that we've had moved to the new bed."

"At the back?"

"Yes, indeed; it's high enough to look over almost everything else we are likely to have. It blossoms early."

"To be a companion to the tulips and hyacinths."

"Have you started any peony seeds?"

"The Reine Hortense. Grandmother advised that. They're well up now."

"I'd plant a few seeds in your bed, too. If you can get a good stand of perennials—flowers that come up year after year of their own accord—it saves a lot of trouble."

"Those pinks are perennials, aren't they? They come up year after year in Grandmother's garden."

"Yes, they are, and so is the columbine. You ought to put that in."

"But it isn't pink. We got some in the woods the other day. It is red," objected Dorothy.

"The columbine has been 'burbanked.' There's a pink one among the cultivated kinds. They're larger than the wild ones and very lovely."

"Mother has some. Hers are called the 'Rose Queen,'" said Margaret. "There are yellow and blue ones, too."

"Your grandmother can give you some pink Canterbury bells that will blossom this year. They're biennials, you know."

"Does that mean they blossom every two years?"

"Not exactly. It means that the ones you planted in your flats will only make wood and leaves this year and won't put out any flowers until next year. That's all these pink ones of your grandmother's did last season; this summer they're ready to go into your bed and be useful."

"Our seedlings are blue, anyway," Ethel Blue reminded the others. "They must be set in the blue bed."

"How about sweet williams?" asked Mr. Emerson. "Don't I remember some in your yard?"

"Mother planted some last year," answered Roger, "but they didn't blossom."

"They will this year. They're perennials, but it takes them one season to make up their minds to set to work. There's an annual that you might sow now that will be blossoming in a few weeks. It won't last over, though."

"Annuals die down at the end of the first season. I'm getting these terms straightened in my so-called mind," laughed Dorothy.

"You said you had a bleeding heart—"

"A fine old perennial," exclaimed Ethel Brown, airing her new information.

"—and pink candy-tuft for the border and foxgloves for the back; are those old plants or seedlings?"

"Both."

"Then you're ready for anything! How about snapdragons?"

"I thought snapdragons were just common weeds," commented James.

"They've been improved, too, and now they are large and very handsome and of various heights. If you have room enough you can have a lovely bed of tall ones at the back, with the half dwarf kind before it and the dwarf in front of all. It gives a sloping mass of bloom that is lovely, and if you nip off the top blossoms when the buds appear you can make them branch sidewise and become thick."

"We certainly haven't space for that bank arrangement in our garden," decided Roger, "but it will be worth trying in Dorothy's new garden," and he put down a "D" beside the note he had made.

"The snapdragon sows itself so you're likely to have it return of its own accord another year, so you must be sure to place it just where you'd like to have it always," warned Mr. Emerson.

"The petunia sows itself, too," Margaret contributed to the general stock of knowledge. "You can get pretty, pale, pink petunias now, and they blossom at a great rate all summer."

"I know a plant we ought to try," offered James. "It's the plant they make Persian Insect Powder out of."

"The Persian daisy," guessed Mr. Emerson. "It would be fun to try that."

"Wouldn't it be easier to buy the insect powder?" asked practical Ethel Brown.

"Very much," laughed her grandfather, "but this is good fun because it doesn't always blossom 'true,' and you never know whether you'll get a pink or a deep rose color. Now, let me see," continued Mr. Emerson thoughtfully, "you've arranged for your hollyhocks and your phlox—those will be blooming by the latter part of July, and I suppose you've put in several sowings of sweetpeas?"

They all laughed, for Roger's demand for sweetpeas had resulted in a huge amount of seeds being sown in all three of the gardens.

"Where are we now?" continued Mr. Emerson.

"Now there ought to be something that will come into its glory about the first of August," answered Helen.

"What do you say to poppies?"

"Are there pink poppies?"

"O, beauties! Big bears, and little bears, and middle-sized bears; single and double, and every one of them a joy to look upon!"

"Put down poppies two or three times," laughed Helen in answer to her grandfather's enthusiasm.

"And while we're on the letter 'P' in the seed catalogue," added Mr. Emerson, "order a few packages of single portulaca. There are delicate shades of pink now, and it's a useful little plant to grow at the feet of tall ones that have no low-growing foliage and leave the ground bare."

"It would make a good border for us at some time."

"You might try it at Dorothy's large garden. There'll be space there to have many different kinds of borders."

"We'll have to keep our eyes open for a pink lady's slipper over in the damp part of the Clarks' field," said Roger.

"O, I speak for it for my wild garden," cried Helen.

"You ought to find one about the end of July, and as that is a long way off you can put off the decision as to where to place it when you transplant it," observed their grandfather dryly.

"Mother finds verbenas and 'ten week stocks' useful for cutting," said Margaret. "They're easy to grow and they last a long time and there are always blossoms on them for the house."

"Pink?" asked Ethel Blue, her pencil poised until she was assured.

"A pretty shade of pink, both of them, and they're low growing, so you can put them forward in the beds after you take out the bulbs that blossomed early."

"How are we going to know just when to plant all these things so they'll come out when we want them to?" asked Della, whose city life had limited her gardening experience to a few summers at Chautauqua where they went so late in the season that their flower beds had been planted for them and were already blooming when they arrived.

"Study your catalogues, my child," James instructed her.

"But they don't always tell," objected Della, who had been looking over several.

"That's because the seedsmen sell to people all over the country—people living in all sorts of climates and with all sorts of soils. The best way is to ask the seedsman where you buy your seeds to indicate on the package or in a letter what the sowing time should be for our part of the world."

"Then we'll bother Grandfather all we can," threatened Ethel Brown seriously. "He's given us this list in the order of their blossoming—"

"More or less," interposed Mr. Emerson. "Some of them over-lap, of course. It's roughly accurate, though."

"You can't stick them in a week apart and have them blossom a week apart?" asked Della.

"Not exactly. It takes some of them longer to germinate and make ready to bloom than it does others. But of course it's true in a general way that the first to be planted are the first to bloom."

"We haven't put in the late ones yet," Ethel Blue reminded Mr. Emerson.

"Asters, to begin with. I don't see how there'll be enough room in your small bed to make much of a show with asters. I should put some in, of course, in May, but there's a big opportunity at the new garden to have a splendid exhibition of them. Some asters now are almost as large and as handsome as chrysanthemums—astermums, they call them—and the pink ones are especially lovely."

"Put a big 'D' against 'asters,'" advised Roger. "That will mean that there must be a large number put into Dorothy's new garden."

"The aster will begin to blossom in August and will continue until light frost and the chrysanthemums will begin a trifle later and will last a little longer unless there is a killing frost."

"Can we get blossoms on chrysanthemums the first, year?" asked Margaret, who had not found that true in her experience in her mother's garden.

"There are some new kinds that will blossom the first year, the seedsmen promise. I'd like to have you try some of them."

"Mother has two or three pink ones—well established plants—that she's going to let us move to the pink bed," said Helen.

"The chrysanthemums will end your procession," said Mr. Emerson, "but you mustn't forget to put in some mallow. They are easy to grow and blossom liberally toward the end of the season."

"Can we make candy marshmallows out of it?"

"You can, but it would be like the Persian insect powder—it would be easier to buy it. But it has a handsome pink flower and you must surely have it on your list."

"I remember when Mother used to have the greatest trouble getting cosmos to blossom," said Margaret. "The frost almost always caught it. Now there is a kind that comes before the frost."

"Cosmos is a delight at the end of the season," remarked Mr. Emerson. "Almost all the autumn plants are stocky and sturdy, but cosmos is as graceful as a summer plant and as delicate as a spring blossom. You can wind up your floral year with asters and mallow and chrysanthemums and cosmos all blooming at once."

"Now for the blue beds," said Tom, excusing himself for looking at his watch on the plea that he and Della had to go back to New York by a comparatively early train.

"If you're in a hurry I'll just give you a few suggestions," said Mr. Emerson. "Really blue flowers are not numerous, I suppose you have noticed."

"We've decided on ageratum for the border and larkspur and monkshood for the back," said Ethel Brown.

"There are blue crocuses and hyacinths and 'baby's breath' for your earliest blossoms, and blue columbines as well as pink and yellow ones! and blue morning glories for your 'climber,' and blue bachelors' buttons and Canterbury bells, and mourning bride, and pretty blue lobelia for low growing plants and blue lupine for a taller growth. If you are willing to depart from real blue into violet you can have heliotrope and violets and asters and pansies and primroses and iris."

"The wild flag is fairly blue," insisted Roger, who was familiar with the plants that edged the brook on his grandfather's farm.

"It is until you compare it with another moisture lover—forget-me-not."

"If Dorothy buys the Clarks' field she can start a colony of flags and forget-me-nots in the stream," suggested James.

"Can you remember cineraria? There's a blue variety of that, and one of salpiglossis, which is an exquisite flower in spite of its name."

"One of the sweetpea packages is marked 'blue,'" said Roger, "I wonder if it will be a real blue?"

"Some of them are pretty near it. Now this isn't a bad list for a rather difficult color," Mr. Emerson went on, looking over Ethel Blue's paper, "but you can easily see that there isn't the variety of the pink list and that the true blues are scarce."

"We're going to try it, anyway," returned Helen. "Perhaps we shall run across some others. Now I wrote down for the yellows, yellow crocuses first of all and yellow tulips."

"There are many yellow spring flowers and late summer brings goldenrod, so it seems as if the extremes liked the color," said Margaret observantly.

"The intermediate season does, too," returned Mr. Emerson.

"Daffodils and jonquils are yellow and early enough to suit the most impatient," remarked James.

"Who wrote this," asked Mr. Emerson, from whom Ethel Brown inherited her love of poetry: