Part 17

"Oh, because otherwise they don't catch hold properly and make themselves at home. I didn't mean to spoil your neat box," he continued penitently. "May I help you?"

"Why, of course you must," I said, brightening up. "Look at all that has to be done. Jim, dear, fill those boxes nicely with mould, a judicious mixture of looseness and compression."

"I've other fish to fry this afternoon. If his Reverence's Young Man will do some beastly algebra for me I will stay and mess about with you; if not, he has got to do the messing."

And so Jim deserted us, and we planted and pulled at each other's boxes, and I certainly tried to get some of his out. And then the fresh difficulty faced us where to put all these new boxes, for they had to be protected from the still frosty nights, and also from any too heavy rains which might, perchance, drown them. I wanted much more room than the one frame afforded, even could I turn out all the scraggy geraniums.

"They must be protected somehow," I said despondingly, "and we can't carry them in and out of doors, and oh! how heavy even these little boxes are. There's the verandah, but the Others will never let me crowd them out with these boxes. It is just getting sunny out there. What can we do?"

The Young Man looked round and thought, and thought, and then it came, an idea worth patenting.

"You don't want heat for them?"

"Oh, no, they ought to be hardened, you see."

"And it's only at night, or against heavy rains, that they want protecting?"

"That's all."

"Well, then, I have it!" And he had it, the germ of the brilliant idea that, with Jim's assistance and mine, and Griggs's for actual manual labour, gradually evolved into an impromptu frame and saved us even the making of new boxes.

This was the plan of action.

We cleared a space in the little yard where the frame lived, and the manure heap in one corner, and one sunny border which held lettuce and I intended should hold my plantlets later on. We made first a bed of cinders (this for drainage), then a layer of manure (this for heat), then good mould, and all were enclosed with four strong planks, and in this protected spot we pricked out our nurslings. At night they were covered with a plank or two and some sacking, and this also protected them during any very heavy rains, until they grew strong enough to weather them. The boxes already pricked out we protected in like manner, only making no special bed for them.

It became truly a delight to see how day by day those tiny sprigs of green grew and prospered, and to watch the development of the various leaves. The pretty crinkly little round leaves of the polyanthus, the neat spiky twig of the marigold and tagetes, the sturdy, even-growing antirrhinum with pale green stalks for white, and yellow and rich brown for the red variety, and the trim, three-cornered leaves of the nasturtium, each after its kind, very wonderful when we realise all that potentiality enclosed in a pin's point of a seed, and needing no difference of treatment to produce either zinnia or lobelia.

I made all the Others, and everyone else too, walk round my nursery and dilated on the promising appearance of my children.

"Wonderfully neat! but how tiny they all are. Do you mean to say you expect those little things to flower this year? Why, it is like asking a baby of six months old to ride a bicycle!" said one of the Others.

"But they are annuals! In comparison they are now twenty years old! Of course they will flower this year, and be old and done for by October."

"Well, you are very hopeful, but I don't expect much result this year."

"You will see!"

"Well, we have not seen much yet, have we?"

* * * * *

The packets containing my biennial seeds, which, of course, means such seeds as sown one year furnish plants for the next year's flowering and then go the way of all "grass," instructed me to sow in the open from March or April to June.

From what I have so far learned I would certainly advise sowing as early as possible and not taking June into consideration at all. The little plants get forward before the really hot weather begins, and usually the clouds supply sufficient water at that time; but if not, on no account must they go thirsty. I found watering a great necessity, for my ground is as porous as a sieve; a substratum of nice cool tenacious clay must be a great boon to those who happily have it. I suppose it may have some drawbacks, but my imagination is not lively enough to suggest any. Being light and poor, I usually doctored the soil before sowing the seeds. I believe it ought not to be really necessary; but a little manure mixed with leaf mould and some earth from a convenient shrubbery or background place, and all dug well in, was approved of by the plantlets. If by any chance you can lay aside, from hedgerows, corners of field or other prigable parts, some rolls of turf and let it stand aside until it rots, it makes most helpful dressing, particularly for rose roots.

After the ground is ready make little straight trenches about one inch deep, and thinly, because they are certain anyway to be too close, scatter in your seeds. There for the present your work ends, and Mother Earth commences her never-ending miracle of death and resurrection. "Thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or some other grain," and "that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die," when, "God giveth it a body, to every seed his own body."

Those little brown pin points, of which you hold hundreds in a pinch on your palm, each one has its "celestial" body ready to spring into life through the dark gateway of death. Surely St Paul must have had his garden as a little boy, and sown his seeds, and marvelled, even as Jim and I did, with eyes opening to the wonder of it all. A wonder that is passed over in the matter-of-course way of the daily round, but that startles one, almost as a revelation, when one's own hand holds the seed, sows it, and then watches for the result.

To say it is just "life" or the "force of nature" or "the energy that is behind all things," these are but words, the marvel remains. Irresistibly the thought arises, "With what body shall we come?" Not with the old earth body for sure, if my seeds are to teach me anything.

So I sowed first the forget-me-nots, as this year they must come from seed. Another year I will take the little shoots that are round the old plant and, separating them, will prick them out in a nursery spot, and so shall my plants for the following year be more mature, stronger, and therefore better flowering; a first year's forget-me-nots are apt to be straggling. Then the sweet-Williams, the wallflowers, red and gold, Canterbury bells, silene, the little bright pink edging that with forget-me-nots makes a border so gay in spring time, these were my first year's venture in biennials; for though some of them may be considered perennials, the best results may be hoped for from a continuously fresh store.

The big sunflower seeds I placed just where I wanted them to come up, sometimes a single one, so that the plant should have all its own way, and wear as big a head as it knew how, and others in groups of four or five.