Free The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey

a television garden, and she could afford to experiment a bit. Should she try a rock garden again? Hers had always failed—hadn’t, at least, equaled the one she remembered at Silvergate that her grandfather had made, with its green and white and blue and purple clusters of tiny Alpine flowers, looking as if nature had done it all by accident. The one Rosie attempted had looked studied and rather silly, and she had eventually ripped out all the plants and let it revert to a rock pile where the Sheffields’ cat sunned herself. But she was tempted by her memory. Or sweet peas: she’d never grown nice sweet peas, though she had dug them deep, mulched with peat moss, watered like mad, and provided expensive “weatherized trellis netting” for them to climb on; and yet she remembered the Painted Ladies and Queen Alexandras that had flourished so easily in the garden in England. And Japanese iris, of course, which she could never get to thrive properly in her yard.
    She sat for hours with catalogs from Park’s and Wayside and Harris and Johnny’s and Weston’s and the New England Rootstock Association and Thompson and Morgan. There was a stack of letters, too, from nurseries and seed companies and manufacturers of garden implements, asking her to endorse their products or accept free samples. She looked through these, to see what temptations she was so nobly rejecting, and then threw them in the fire. She never gave in to such blandishments; she hated being beholden. What she liked, in spite of any small fame she had acquired, was to sit down with the catalogs like a typical suburban gardener, and paw through them. She picked out a new hybrid primrose, decided to skip the rock garden, took a chance on a perennial bush strawberry and some yellow raspberries, and ordered more vegetable seeds than she could ever use.
    â€œRosie Mortimer’s Garden,” perforce, contained plenty of veggie lore. Unlike the English, whose flowers come first, Americans tend to grow vegetables.
    â€œIf I can’t eat it I don’t grow it,” Kathy Andrews always said. She was Rosie’s across-the-street neighbor, whose backyard plot produced a stand of corn every summer that could serve as a set for Oklahoma! And Jim and Kiki Sheffield, next door, grew tomatoes; their garden was a wilderness of red fruit, green foliage, and yellow beetle traps, and they put up hundreds of quarts of tomato sauce over Labor Day weekend every year. “What do you do with it all?” Rosie asked once when they brought over her annual gift of a half a dozen jars. “I put tomato sauce in everything ,” Kiki said. And it was true that whenever Rosie ate dinner there they had something red and Italian.
    So she did vegetables for her fans. If she concentrated chiefly on flowers, her great love, she’d be briskly canceled. But she had nothing against veggies, and she happily grew plenty of them herself, though she drew the line at corn. For one show, she invited the cameras across the street and introduced Kathy, her picturesque family, and her cornpatch onto WEZL–TV (and that segment was expanded by the genius of Janice into a series they called “My Neighbors’ Gardens”).
    Rosie was unable to decide about the iris and left that order for another sleepless night or peaceful afternoon. Wandering among flowers and shrubs and rows of vegetables—even on paper, in imagination, in memory—soothed her and made her, toward dawn, comfortably sleepy, so that she slept at last with gardens in her dreams instead of children.
    It snowed all that night, and by morning there were several inches. The plows hadn’t yet come when Rosie got up at ten. Schools were closed; the Andrews children, in red and blue hats, were out in their yard making a snowman. There was the hushed, clanky rasp of shoveling. A dog woofed excitedly over someone’s lawn. Precarious rims of snow outlined the branches of