And all in all the day passed peacefully, culminating in the most delightful of roast chicken meals. Gladys deigned to join us and lifted not a finger to help in either the preparation or cleanup, but we ignored this, which I think she found a little disappointing.

* * *

Monday morning, Zebediah took off for the woods again.

Winifred and I had just started to gather eggs when Wilfred came by the chicken coop with a wheelbarrow.

“I need to get some compost,” he said. “Old Tom said that because we have the potato field and kitchen garden under control, we can take a morning to do a quick compost blitz of the other gardens. I’m taking wheelbarrow loads to all of them.”

“I love the flower gardens,” said Winifred, turning to me as we watched Wilfred shovel compost from the pile a little way from the chicken coop. “Do you have a favorite? I like the one with the really tall flowers.”

“That’s the English garden,” I said. “It’s my favorite, too. It has hollyhocks and Canterbury bells and lupines and poppies. We don’t know who planted it. We think it might have been Old Tom’s aunt Bertha, but we’re not sure. When I was little I used to play there all the time because it looked like just the sort of garden where fairies would live. Sina’s favorite is the Italian garden.”

Winifred and I grabbed shovels and walked over to help Wilfred. As the three of us took a wheelbarrowful across one of the many hayfields to the English garden, I pointed to the formal boxwood maze and hedge patterns of the Italian garden in the corner of the farm. Next to it was the statuary garden, which required little care, being mostly dwarf trees and statues.

“The Italian garden, the statuary garden, and the herb garden were planted by the people who put in tennis courts and had fabulous parties,” I said. “Old Tom never liked those gardens much because they have no flowers and the boxwood needs constant pruning. He would have bulldozed them except for Sina. He doesn’t see the beauty in the Italian garden the way she does. The herb garden also has boxwood that needs pruning, but it’s low to the ground and planted to separate the different herbs into geometric beds. Old Tom says the tennis-court people must have loved boxwood. He doesn’t mind trimming it in the herb garden so much because at least you get herbs out of it and the boxwood has a useful purpose there.”

“He says we’re not doing anything in the wildflower garden or the garden of exotic blooms today,” said Wilfred as we dumped compost in the English garden and went to get the next load for the heliotrope garden.

“The heliotrope garden is my second favorite,” I said as we filled the wheelbarrow again, “because it’s so romantic and smells so good. Mrs. Brown put it in. But it needs constant pinching back. I try to go in whenever I pass it and pinch it back a bit each time, because I’m afraid that if one garden were to be plowed under it would be that one. Old Tom wants to expand the vegetable growing, but it means losing one of the flower gardens. He’ll never plow under the Japanese garden, because that’s his favorite even though he always says he’s sorry he ever put it in.”