Mulch ado about nothing Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m visiting my children and grandchildren and giving lectures in Chicago. But I’m not as familiar with this area as the rest of you, so I leave it up to the group to plan the schedule.”
    Everybody exchanged addresses and it turned out that nobody lived terribly far away. It would be simple to do two gardens a day in the second half of class. Simple in theory, of course, until other factors came into it. Miss Winstead wanted to go first because she had something blooming that wouldn’t last beyond Tuesday or Wednesday. Ursula Appledorn lived near a house that had a huge garage sale nearly every Thursday, and parking at her home that day would be impossible.
    Dr. Eastman waited with barely controlled impatience while a great deal of time was wasted discussing routes, and days, and car-pool participants, the students occasionally wandering far off the subject entirely to speculate about weather, road conditions, and garden-tool storage as well as to make some random comments on hairdressers, some controversial decisions the city council was considering, and What Our Youth Are Coming To.
    Shelley, in an agony over the others’ lack of control and organizational abilities, took over. “Here, I’ve listened to everyone and drawn up a schedule. Pass it around and copy it down.”
    She rather violently ripped a page out of her spiral notebook and thrust it at Ursula, who had caused the most meanderings.
    “Are we all sorted out now?“ Dr. Eastman asked.
    Everybody looked at Shelley.
    “We had better be,“ she said firmly.
    Miss Martha Winstead, a woman of the same cut, nodded to Shelley approvingly.
    “Very well, I’ll just let my assistant know we’re ready for the next item,“ Eastman said, going to the door and calling down the hall to someone named Bryan.
    Bryan turned out to be a large, faintly stupid-looking teenager with very serious muscles and extraordinary balance. He carried a large box as lightly and carefully as Jane would have handled an egg carton. He set it down on the desk. It was a box with a cover that went almost to the bottom of the lower box. Sort of like a giant candy box. Bryan and Dr. Eastman each eased up one side of it.
    On the platform of the lower box was a miniature garden. Something spiky in the middle and a frothy mass of what Jane thought was artemisia around the edge. But what was between these was confusing.
    Small compact plants with jagged dark green foliage and coral pink flowers.
    “What are the pink ones?“ Shelley asked.
    Dr. Eastman leaned forward and said in a thrilling voice, “Marigolds.“
    “Marigolds aren’t pink. They’re all colors of gold, cream, and orange,“ Ursula said, getting up to take a good look. The rest of the group followed her example.
    “These are marigolds,“ Dr. Eastman said firmly. “I’m sorry I can’t share them with you because I’ve applied for the patent, but they’re not available to the public yet.”
    Jane wasn’t all that knowledgeable about plants, but she knew marigolds well. They were one of the few annuals that could survive her neglect and were cheap enough to buy a lot of. “Could we touch them?“ she asked.
    “Certainly,“ Eastman replied.
    Jane pinched a leaf and smelled her fingers. It was the distinct odor of marigolds. The foliage was exactly right—dark, glossy green with jagged edges. It was the color that was astonishing. The flowers were certainly shaped exactly like marigolds, but looked as if they must have been dyed and stuck on with wires. She touched a flower and it was lush and alive. Could they have been injected along the stem or soil with that color?
    She remembered the Queen Anne’s lace along the hedgerows of her grandmother’s farm. She and her sister Marty would pick them and Grandmother would let them put the stems in colored water and sometimes little bottles of ink, and the creamy white flowers changed to that color.
    Could you do that to a cream-colored marigold?
    Or was it truly a coral