Ethel Morton's Enterprise Part 12

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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Was.h.i.+ngton to any one who asks for them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Flat]

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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g off the dead leaves from the ivies and geraniums and of was.h.i.+ng 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

'Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come.'"

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 s.p.a.ce 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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--

"'Blue ran the flash across; Violets were born!'"

"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."

"Such a starved bank of moss Till, that May morn, Blue ran the flash across: Violets were born!

"Sky--what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud: Splendid, a star!

"World--how it walled about Life with disgrace Till G.o.d's own smile came out: That was thy face!"

"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 a.n.a.lyze. It has the same sort of stem that the hepatica has."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Yellow Adder's Tongue]

"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!"