YOUR GARDEN AND MINE
By
Ann Earncliff
Brown
(No. 22)
CHEL OF THE ROSES E met at a bus stop on one of those windy, trying days that make parcelladen walking a trial, gardening a heartache, and grumbling in general fatally easy. Rachel, going into Standard.. II. and. delightfully brown from long summer holidays, made room for me and my parcels, shifting bathing towel and suit with an eager, natural courtesy. "Ouch! Isn’t it hot?" I complained, even as I smiled) my thanks, but the small girl quite gravely assured me that she did not feel the heat at all. "I could swim when I was three" rather proudly, "Skin feels: quite cool after being in the sea." She had been examining two small grazed knees, but as she spoke her eyes turned towards the lovely sparkling waves, but paused as only the
gaze of flower-lovers can at a bank of soft midnight-blue petunias. Since we both admired petunias, it was but a matter of seconds till we were quite chummy, I learned that the little girl who took care of Mummy whose head sometimes aches, was called Rachel and that Rachel and Daddy held competitions in their garden. "TI get all the best places for my things so I often beat Daddy "-a wise Daddy indeed. In Rachel’s garden are lots of roses with bedding plants of deep blue forget-me-nots and "those funny little yellow pansy things with black lines on them--‘ pussy faces’ we call them," The small gardener was interested to hear of the water lilies in my garden pond, telling me, in her turn of her Auntie’s water lilies with a big ornamental frog sitting in the midst of the shining lily pads. Quaintly and charmingly the childish lips mimicked the fountain frog as he spouted water-* all coloured at night like that fountain in Christchurch." In payment for a vision of cool splashing waters, and a small happy girl watering her Daddy’s garden, I promised some day to write a story about "Rachel of the Roses." Perhaps this is not strictly " Your Garden and Mine" but for all folks with gardens and small girls it has a message.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 34, 16 February 1940, Page 41
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363YOUR GARDEN AND MINE New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 34, 16 February 1940, Page 41
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