And then they began to plan for the new garden of summer-time, which was to be made outside.
Most of their things they thought they would take out of the windows, and reset in the open garden, but, of course, there were no radishes or lettuce to take now, and the corn and pease were no longer of value, while the vines would be hard to move. So they decided to take out all but the vines. Prue could reset her pansies and nasturtiums and sunflower, and the sweet-pease, which would bloom all summer, perhaps, leaving the morning-glories and scarlet runner in the windows, to bloom as long as they would.
"My windows would look very bare without even the vines left of the little gardens," said big Prue, "but it is getting so green outside, that we won't miss them so much now, and, of course, everything must go, sometime."
"And we are going to have them next year," said Davy. "We will begin then earlier, and have other things, too, but first we are going to have ever and ever so much outside, in the real garden. Prue is going to have flowers,
and I am going to have, oh, ever and ever so many good things to eat!"
And so with big Prue's birthday dinner, the little garden in the windows saw its greatest glory, and the month of April, which had been its happiest season, came to a happy end.
MAY
I SWEET-PEASE HAVE TO BE PUT DOWN PRETTY DEEP
Some sweet-pease, it is true, little Prue had planted earlier, one warm day in April, when the Chief Gardener had dug for her a trench along the fence, and she had put in the pease, one at a time, and just so far apart, so that they wouldn't crowd, she said, or get in each other's way. The trench was quite deep most too deep, Prue thought, but then sweet-pease have to be put down pretty deep, and the soil dragged up to the vines as they grow, to give them strength. Now, she planted some sweet-williams, and pansies, and mignonettes, and alyssum, and had brought most of her pots from the house, and set the things in a little row by themselves, so that they might still be company as they had been through the long winter and late spring.
Davy, too, had made a fine garden, with six hills of sweet-corn, one hill of cantaloupes, a row of pease, a little row of onions, lettuce, and radishes, besides a very small row of sweet herbs, such as marjoram, fennel, and thyme. Each garden was fully eight feet square, which is really quite a good-sized garden, when you remember that it must be kept nicely tilled and perfectly clean of weeds.
"I think I will have a hill of cucumbers, too," said Davy. "I like cucumbers."
"But they won't do, near your cantaloupes," said the Chief Gardener. "You see, cucumbers and cantaloupes belong to the same family, and one of the most twining, friendly families I know of. Each member left to itself is very good in its way, and often ornamental, but let them run together ever so little and before you know it they begin to mix up and look like one another, and even have tastes alike. A cucumber-hill there, Davy, would spoil the taste of your cantaloupes, and the cucumbers would not be good either. It's the same way with watermelons, and citrons, and pumpkins, and all the rest of the gourds."
"Gourds!"
"Why, yes, they all belong to the Gourd family, and they will all look and taste like gourds if you give them a chance. It's really, of course, because the pollen of one blows into the bloom of the other, and the members of the Gourd family are so closely related that pollens blend and mix. Different kinds of corn will do the same thing. That is why we have our popcorn as far from our sweet corn as we can get it. There are other families that do not mix at all. We grow apples and plums and peaches and roses, side by side even different kinds of each and they never mix."
"But apples and plums and peaches are not roses, are they?" asked little Prue.
"Just as much as strawberries, and pears and quinces are," said the Chief Gardener.
The children looked at him rather puzzled.
"How about blackberries and raspberries?" asked the Chief Gardener. "Don't you think they look a little, a very little, like wild roses, only the flowers are smaller and white, instead of pink?"
"Why, yes, so they do!" nodded Davy.
"And doesn't the bloom of a blackberry look like the bloom of a plum, and a cherry, and a pear, and an apple, and all those things?"
"A good deal," said Prue, "and wild crab blossoms look just like little wild roses, and they smell so sweet, too."
"And the wild crab has thorns like a rose, only not so sharp," said Davy.
"And a rose has little apples after the bloom falls," said the Chief Gardener. "I have known children to eat rose apples, though I don't think they could be very good."
Davy had run down to the corner of the garden and came back now with something in his hand. It was a wild rose that grew by the hedge there; a pretty, single pink blossom. Then he stopped and picked a strawberry bloom, and one from the apple-tree that hung over the fence. These he brought over to the little bench where Prue and the Chief Gardener had sat down to rest.