Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 302, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 December 1915 — To Much Botany [ARTICLE]

To Much Botany

“What la this I hear about the Randoms being unhappy?” demanded Lucy. “If ever there seemed to be a couple made for each other it was Rose and Guy Random, and since they bought that summer cottage in the woods they appeared to have reached the climax of bliss.”

“No, it was another kind of climax that they reached,” declared Eunice as she sank into the porch hammock and poked a pillow under her bead. “Dear me, I hope it is not a case of affinity,” sighed Lucy. “If it is I shall never again have any faith in married happiness. Never!” “Well, it was one kind of affinity, certainly.. It was the love of nature that came between them,” declared Eunice. "It seems absurd, doesn’t it? But, really, if you had seen what I saw the last time I visited them you would not blame Guy for rebelling against having every flower that exists —and every weed, too —thrust down his throat and under his nose.” “I never knew that Rose went in for nature. She was born and raised in the city and " “Yes, that’s the worst of IL When a city woman falls in love with nature she simply loses her head completely, and Rose always was of the gushing type." ♦Tell me all about it," begged Lucy. “In the first place,” said Eunice, Rose has supplied herself with three books on flowers, and the time that she should devote to housekeeping she passes in trying to discover whether a certain flower that she has picked belongs to this family or the other. The conversation runs something like this? “Oh, Guy, do look at this lovely wild flower that I found in the woods! Won’t you help me find out what it is? Now you look in that book and I will look in this one! What Guy really wants to look at is his evening paper.

“And then Rose will break out with: •Why I think it must be pussy toes. The flower looks like it but the leaf is different I wonder if it can be baby’s breath. The leaves are exactly alike but somehow the flowers are not like those described in this botany.’ “And then Guy, who has been impatiently and helplessly turning the pages of his book, will burst out with: “*Now see here, Rose, I like flowers, but I don’t care a button—he didn’t say button, —but I put that in to sound better —“whether they are pussy-toes or cat’s nose or baby’s breath. By any name they would be as sweet to me, and I am not going to spend half of my precious hours in the country trying to find out to what family every blamed flower belongs. Besides,’ he went on, T don’t believe there is any safe authority on the subject*

• *Why only the other day I was coming home from the country club with that bunch of pinkish blossoms that is on the mantel, and that I found growing by a fence. And in the course of my walk I met three different friends. The first was Mrs. Slader, and she said In a voice of horticultural authority: " * “What a lovely bunch of Prince’s 1 feather you have," and I told her that I was glad to know the name of it, or at least I knew you would be. And I went on my way rejoicing in both the flowers and the name with which I was to regale you. “ *The next person I met was Mrs. Harvar, and when she saw my flowers she exclaimed with delight: “Oh, l*m so glad to see those klss-me-over-the-fences, they remind me of my youth and my homo garden where I used to cultivate all the wild flowers.**

“ "Those identical blossoms) reminded the next person I met of the fact that they were coxcombs, and by the time I reached home the flowers were positively wilting under the heat of so much controversy. “'So do give up this everlasting hunt for names.' “But Rose wouldn't give up the hunt,” went on Eunice, nor would she cease begging Guy to go long jaunts with her to spots where she remembered having seen a certain flower or fern and which she could never seem to find again. They used to return from these expeditions looking anything but pleased, and Guy's clothes would be covered with burs. “That was the way these things wore when I last visited them, but I understand that since then the breach has widened.” 'Huh,” declared Lucy with a note of contempt in her voice, “I should think that married people might find something better to quarrel about”