“Pink rambler,” they all wrote.  “What’s its name?”

“Dorothy—­”

“Smith?”

“Perkins.”

James went through a pantomime that registered severe disappointment.

“Suppose we begin at the beginning,” suggested Mr. Emerson.  “I believe we can make out a list that will keep your pink bed gay from May till frost.”

“That’s what we want.”

“You had some pink tulips last spring.”

“We planted them in the autumn so that they’d come out early this spring.  By good luck they’re just where we’ve decided to have a pink bed.”

“There’s your first flower, then.  They’re near the front of the bed, I hope.  The low plants ought to be in front, of course, so they won’t be hidden.”

“They’re in front.  So are the hyacinths.”

“Are you sure they’re all pink?”

“It’s a great piece of good fortune—­Mother selected only pink bulbs and a few yellow ones to put back into the ground and gave the other colors to Grandmother.”

“That helps you at the very start-off.  There are two kinds of pinks that ought to be set near the front rank because they don’t grow very tall—­the moss pink and the old-fashioned ‘grass pink.’  They are charming little fellows and keep up a tremendous blossoming all summer long.”

“‘Grass pink,’” repeated Ethel, Brown, “isn’t that the same as ’spice pink’?”

“That’s what your grandmother calls it.  She says she has seen people going by on the road sniff to see what that delicious fragrance was.  I suppose these small ones must be the original pinks that the seedsmen have burbanked into the big double ones.”

“’Burbanked’?”

“That’s a new verb made out of the name of Luther Burbank, the man who has raised such marvelous flowers in California and has turned the cactus into a food for cattle instead of a prickly nuisance.”

“I’ve heard of him,” said Margaret. “‘Burbanked’ means ’changed into something superior,’ I suppose.”

“Something like that.  Did you tell me you had a peony?”

There’s a good, tall tree peony that we’ve had moved to the new bed.”

“At the back?”

“Yes, indeed; it’s high enough to look over almost everything else we are likely to have.  It blossoms early.”

“To be a companion to the tulips and hyacinths.”

“Have you started any peony seeds?”

“The Reine Hortense.  Grandmother advised that.  They’re well up now.”

“I’d plant a few seeds in your bed, too.  If you can get a good stand of perennials—­flowers that come up year after year of their own accord—­it saves a lot of trouble.”

“Those pinks are perennials, aren’t they?  They come up year after year in Grandmother’s garden.”

“Yes, they are, and so is the columbine.  You ought to put that in.”

“But it isn’t pink.  We got some in the woods the other day.  It is red,” objected Dorothy.