"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' b.u.t.tons 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:

"I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high on vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

"Wordsworth," cried Ethel Brown.

"Wordsworth," exclaimed Tom Watkins in the same breath.

"That must mean that daffies grow wild in England," remarked Dorothy.

"They do, and we can have something of the same effect here if we plant them through a lawn. The bulbs must be put in like other bulbs, in the autumn. Crocuses may be treated in the same way. Then in the spring they come gleaming through the sod and fill everybody with Wordsworth's delight."

"Here's another compet.i.tion between Helen's wild garden and the color bed; which shall take the b.u.t.tercups and cowslips?"

"Let the wild bed have them," urged Grandfather. "There will be plenty of others for the yellow bed."

"We want yellow honeysuckle climbing on the high wire," declared Roger.

"a.s.sisted by yellow jessamine?" asked Margaret.

"And canary bird vine," contributed Ethel Blue.

"And golden glow to cover the fence," added Ethel Brown.

"The California poppy is a gorgeous blossom for an edge," said Ethel Blue, "and there are other kinds of poppies that are yellow."

"Don't forget the yellow columbines," Dorothy reminded them, "and the yellow snapdragons."

"There's a yellow c.o.c.ks...o...b..as well as a red."

"And a yellow verbena."

"Being a doctor's son I happen to remember that calendula, which takes the pain out of a cut finger most amazingly, has a yellow flower."

"Don't forget stocks and marigolds."

"And black-eyed-Susans--rudbeckia--grow very large when they're cultivated."

"That ought to go in the wild garden," said Helen.

"We'll let you have it," responded Roger generously, "We can put the African daisy in the yellow bed instead."

"Calliopsis or coreopsis is one of the yellow plants that the Department of Agriculture Bulletin mentions," said Dorothy. "It tells you just how to plant it and we put in the seeds early on that account."

"Gaillardia always reminds me of it a bit--the lemon color," said Ethel Brown.

"Only that's stiffer. If you want really, truly prim things try zinnias--old maids."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rudbeckia--Black-eyed Susan]

"Zinnias come in a great variety of colors now," reported Mr. Emerson.

"A big bowl of zinnias is a handsome sight."

"We needn't put any sunflowers into the yellow bed," Dorothy reminded them, "because almost my whole back yard is going to be full of them."

"And you needn't plant any special yellow nasturtiums because Mother loves them and she has planted enough to give us flowers for the house, and flowers and leaves for salads and sandwiches, and seeds for pickle to use with mutton instead of capers."

"There's one flower you must be sure to have plenty of even if you don't make these colored beds complete," urged Mr. Emerson; "that's the 'chalk-lover,' gypsophila."

"What is it?"

"The delicate, white blossom that your grandmother always puts among cut flowers. It is feathery and softens and harmonizes the hues of all the rest.

'So warm with light his blended colors flow,'

in a bouquet when there's gypsophila in it."

"But what a name!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Roger.

CHAPTER VIII

CAVE LIFE