Her face expressed the pleasure she took in the smooth petals of the flower she was working.
The white is a creamy white, the outsides of the outer petals are stained with red, first showing clearly in the bud.
They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars, Like petals from a rose, When suddenly across the June A wind with fingers goes.
Here is a plant (whose chief weakness already lies in a certain over-stiffness) made stiffer and more shapeless still by dwarfing and by cramming with too many petals.
At first sight only these radiant crystals are likely to be noticed, but looking closely you discover a multitude of very small gilias, phloxes, mimulus, etc., many of them with more petals than leaves.
Down toward Stratford there are flat islands covered with sedge, long rows of weeping-willows, low hazel, hawthorn, and places where "Green Grow the Rushes, O." Then, if the farmer leaves a spot untilled, the dogrose pre-empts the place and showers its petals on the vagrant winds.
She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds she might have been a lily too--only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under some clear glass bell.
When a Zinnia has a hard, stiff, tall flower, with a great many rows of petals piled up one on top of another, and when its habit is dwarfed to a mean degree of squatness, it looks to me both ugly and absurd, whereas a reasonably double one, well branched, and two feet high, is a handsome plant.