"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
"When beechen buds begin to swell, And woods the blue-bird"s warble know, The yellow violet"s modest bell Peeps from last year"s leaves below."
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."
[Ill.u.s.tration: Blue Flag]
"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."