Grandmother’s garden, like all real gardens, wasn’t just flowers and fragrance.

There was a brick walk leading from the front gate to the sitting-room entrance — red brick, all moss-grown, and with the tiny weeds and grasses pushing up between the bricks.  In the garden proper the paths were of earth, bordered and well-defined by inch-wide boards that provided jolly tight-rope practice until grandmother came anxiously out with her oft-repeated:  “Willie don’t walk on those boards; you’ll, break them down.”  And just after the warm spring showers these earthwalks always held tiny mud-puddles where the rain-bleached worms congregated until the robins came that way.

There’s something distinctive and individual about the paths in a garden — they either “belong,” or they do not.  Imagine cement walks in grandmother’s garden!  Its walks are as much to a garden as its flowers or its birds or its beetles, and express that dear, indescribable intimacy that makes the Phlox a friend and the Johnny-Jump-Up a play-fellow.

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The best place for angle-worms was underneath the white Syringa bush — the tallest bloomer in the garden except the great Red Rose that climbed over the entire wall of the house, tacked to it by strips of red flannel, and whose blossoms were annually counted and reported to the weekly newspaper.

Another good place was under the Snowball bush, where the ground was covered with white petals dropped from the countless blossom-balls that made passers-by stop in admiration.

Still another good digging-ground was in the Lilac corner where the purple and white bushes exhaled their incomparable perfume.  Grandmother forbade digging in the flower-beds — it was all right to go into the vegetable garden, but the tender flower-roots must not be exposed to the sun by ruthless boy hands intent only on the quest of bait.

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Into the lapel of my dress coat She fastened a delicate orchid last night.  It must have cost a pretty penny, at this season — enough, no doubt, to buy the seeds that would reproduce a half-dozen of my grandmother’s gardens.  And as we moved away in the limousine She asked me why I was so silent.  She could not know that when she slipped its rare stem into place upon my coat, the long years dropped away — and I stood again where the Yellow Rose, all thorn-covered, lifted its sunny top above the picket fence — plucked its choicest blossom, put it almost apologetically and ashamed into the buttonhole of my jacket — stuffed my hands into my pockets and went whistling down the street, with the yellow rose-tint and the sunlight and the curls on my child head all shining in harmony.  The first boutonniere of my life — from the bush that became my confidant through all those wondrous years before they packed my trunk and sent me off to college!

To be sure, I loved the bright-faced Pansies which smiled cheerily up at me from their round bed — and the dear old Pinks, of a strange fragrance all their own — and the Sweet William, and even the grewsome Bleeding Heart that drooped so sad and forlorn in its alloted corner.  Yet it is significant that last night’s orchid took me straight back over memory’s pathway to that simple yellow rosebush by the fence!