solution do these geometries in action, which are plants, progress?
I do not know. But there is a fascinating mystery in considering that
even as species correspond to certain geological periods and thus
group their sympathies, even so to-day they group themselves according
to the seasons. What correspondence is there between the character
of the shivering and snowy liliaceous plants of winter and the
purple solanaceous plants of autumn? And then there are still other
delightful dispositions which are due far less to the artifice of
man than to the consent of certain species to regard others as their
friends and not to pine away beside them. How sweet is the village
garden where the gleaming lily, like those gods who often visit the
humble, lives amid the cabbages, the blue leek, and the scallions,
which boil in the black pot of the poor! How I love the peasant
gardens at noonday when the mournful blue shadow of the vegetables
sleeps in the white squares of granular earth, when the cock calls
the silence, and when the buzzard, slanting and wheeling, makes
the scuttling hen cluck! There are the flowers of simple loves, the
flowers of the young wife who will dry the blue lavender to scent
her coarse sheets. And in this garden grows also the flower of the
rondel--the humble gilliflower with its simple perfume. There is also
the faithful box, each leaf of which is a small mirror of azure, and
the hollyhock in which the sweet and pure flame of melancholy
corollas burns; they are the flowers of religion vowed to silence and
austerity.

And I love also the flora of the meadows: the meadow-sweet swayed by
the breezes, rocked by the murmur of the brook. Its perfumed crown is
adorned like the water-beetles, more iridescent than the throats of
humming-birds.