INVITATION 



ILL you stroll with me awhile across 

 the fields and round the wood edge 

 in search of flowers and ferns ? 



I offer no apology, and no new 

 thing as lure, save perhaps the point 

 of view the flower in the landscape. 

 Wild flowers taken from their surround- 

 ings and considered as aggregations of 

 calyx, corolla, stamen and pistil are wholly dif- 

 ferent from the same flowers seen in their native 

 haunts. Wild Roses clustered in a crystal bowl, 

 like their more robust garden sisters, are beautiful, 

 but they lose the shy loveliness that they wore 

 before you gathered them from beside the mossy 

 bars of the old pasture. 



The Cardinal Flower, that shows its red 

 hood along the waterways or stands sentinel to 

 guard the Closed Gentian where it drowses in 

 moist shade, looks dull and lifeless when massed 



