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Updated: May 13, 2025
No one would have suspected that during the last half-hour she had stirred and baked a pan of brown "gems," mixed a cream mayonnaise for the lettuce, set a glass dish of "junket" to form, and skimmed two pans of cream, beside getting out the soup and sweets for Euphane, and trimming the dishes of fruit with kinnikinick and coreopsis.
How exquisite they were, those delicate ghosts of flowers; the regal columbine, the graceful gilia, coreopsis gleaming golden, anemones, pale and soft. How they kept their loveliness when life was past! They were only flower memories, but how fair they were, and how lasting! No frost to blight them, no winds to tear their silken petals any more! Well might they outlast the hand that pressed them!
Around the house, which wisteria has almost covered, is a garden in which roses predominate, but hollyhocks, coreopsis, and other flowers not demanding constant care grow in luxuriance. There is abundance of water, and filtered sunshine gives a delightful temperature. The thermometer on the vine-clad porch runs up to 80 in the daytime and in the night drops down to 40.
There were masses of gillias, and of wonderful coreopsis, enormous cream-colored stars with deep-orange centres, and deep yellow ones with scarlet centres; thickets of snowy-cupped mentzelia and of wild rose; while here and there a tall red lily burned like a little lonely flame in the green, or regiments of convolvuli waved their stately heads.
The pastor cut down the rank grass and fringy ferns, the flaunting weeds and coreopsis that threatened to choke his more delicate flowers, and, stooping, tied up the crimson pinks, and wound the tendrils of the blue-veined clematis around its slender trellis, and straightened the white petunias and the orange-tinted crocaes, which the last heavy shower had beaten to the ground.
She stood with bent head, busily arranging a spray of coreopsis that fell out over the path, and Isabel was sure her eyes were wet. "I don't know," she said evasively; "maybe not very early." Isabel was looking at her tenderly. It was not a personal tenderness so much as a softness born out of peculiar circumstance. She knew exactly why she was sorry for Ardelia in a way no one else could be.
Close against them and overpeering their tops were hollyhocks and dahlias; against these stood at lesser height sweet peas, asters, zinnias, coreopsis and others of like stature; in front of these were poppies for summer, marigolds for autumn; beneath these again were verbenas, candytuft all this is sketched from memory, and I recall the winsome effect rather than species and names; and still below nestled portulaca and periwinkle.
We soon leave the brilliant, unsatisfying colours of tulips and coreopsis, but we turn again and again to drink in the sweetness of orange-blossoms or volkameria-flowers compared separately, each in its own land, to a betrothed bride, full of love, made fair by the past and future.
Closer to the fence are lemon-yellow coreopsis with quaint, three-cleft leaves; thimble weeds with fruit columns half a finger's length; orange-flowered milkweed, like the color of an oriole's back, made doubly gay by brilliant butterflies and beetles.
Eyebright kept a glass of wild roses or buttercups or white daisies always on the table. She set up a garden of her own, too, after a while, and raised some balsams and "Johnny-jump-ups" from seeds which Mr. Downs gave her, and some golden-brown coreopsis. As for the housekeeping, it fared better than could have been expected with only a little girl of thirteen to look after things.
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