There are flower-lovers who love some flowers and other flower-lovers
who love all flowers. Aunt Jane was of the latter class. The commonest
plant, striving in its own humble way to be sweet and beautiful, was
sure of a place here, and the haughtiest aristocrat who sought
admission had to lay aside all pride of place or birth and acknowledge
her kinship with common humanity. The Bourbon rose could not hold
aside her skirts from contact with the cabbage-rose; the lavender
could not disdain the companionship of sage and thyme. All must live
together in the concord of a perfect democracy. Then if the great
Gardener bestowed rain and sunshine when they were needed, mid-summer
days would show a glorious symphony of color around the gray
farmhouse, and through the enchantment of bloom and fragrance flitted
an old woman, whose dark eyes glowed with the joy of living, and the
joy of remembering all life's other summers.

To Aunt Jane every flower in the garden was a human thing with a life
story, and close to the summer-house grew one historic rose, heroine
of an old romance, to which I listened one day as we sat in the arbor,
where hundreds of honeysuckle blooms were trumpeting their fragrance
on the air.

"Grandmother's rose, child, that's all the name it's got," she said,
in answer to my question. "I reckon you think a fine-lookin' rose like
that ought to have a fine-soundin' name. But I never saw anybody yet
that knew enough about roses to tell what its right name is. Maybe
when I'm dead and gone somebody'll tack a French name on to it, but as
long as it grows in my gyarden it'll be jest grandmother's rose, and
this is how it come by the name:

"My grandfather and grandmother was amongst the first settlers of
Kentucky. They come from the Old Dominion over the Wilderness Road way
back yonder, goodness knows when. Did you ever think, child, how
curious it was for them men to leave their homes and risk their own
lives and the lives of their little children and their wives jest to
git to a new country? It appears to me they must 'a' been led jest
like Columbus was when he crossed the big ocean in his little ships. I
reckon if the women and children had had their way about it, the bears
and wildcats and Indians would be here yet. But a man goes where he
pleases, and a woman's got to foller, and that's the way it was with
grandfather and grandmother. I've heard mother say that grandmother
cried for a week when she found she ha