The Color And Smell Of A Lilac

May is the time when I use the spade. Some professors tell me that there is no need of turning over the soil every year, but how else am I to incorporate my annual dressing of manure and the winter rye? So, each morning, weather permitting, I labor at the end of my old spade. It is a joy to sink the steel with a firm thrust of the foot, a pleasure to feel the muscles of my back bulge as I lift the measure of glistening, black soil - and the keenest delight of all, as I break up the lumps with a careless sweep of the spade, to smell the fragrance of the soil, so rich with the promise of all the harvest soon to be.

One of May's delights, the green of the grass aside, for green is the grandest color of all, I find my greatest pleasure in two particular blossoms. First of all,there is the lilac, the sweet, purple lilac. I suppose they did originally come from Persia or some equally outlandish place, but they are now the very essence of New England. If there is a more magnificent fragrance on a warm showering night than the breath of lilacs coming in through the opened windows, I have yet to meet it.

The other flower, and please do not ask me to choose between them, is the apple tree. I do not mean especially the neat and well-pruned apple trees of our orchards, but the wild trees, those escaped from some long-forgotten orchard. The gnarled and twisted trees, the delicate green of the young leaves, and the blushed white of the flowers - there is beauty beyond comparison!

Speaking of flowers, I have a confession to make. I almost never pick or transplant wild flowers. I have a bit of forest, in fact, which I am holding secure so that wildings can grow as they please untouched.

However, each May I do pick one wild flower which I should not. Along about this time I go into the woods, where the pink lady slippers grow in colonies. Among the pine needles and the oak leaves, there is a mat of the trailing arbutus. I cut off one branch and take it home. It is the price I exact from May for the meanness of March.

SOMEONE IS SURE to take me to task for this preference. I will be told about tulips, iris and so on and on. Well, I planted more than 1,000 tulip bulbs last year, and I have been breeding iris for 20 years. And I know wild flowers; I take an afternoon off every now and then just to go and visit. But, for me, May means lilacs and apple blossoms.