A little time
for a story.
Step into a garden, follow a woodland visitor, or discover what the water kept. Five new tales to open the door to our collections.
The garden in the drawer
When Ada inherited the writing desk, she found a folded drawing beneath the lining of its smallest drawer. A vine crossed the page, then turned back on itself. Between the leaves someone had written the names of people who had once sat at the same table.
She recognized only three. So, on Sunday, she laid the drawing beside the bread and asked her oldest aunt about the others. One name became a neighbor who mended bicycles. Another became a woman who always brought too many pears. By evening, the forgotten names had voices.
Ada never finished copying the pattern. Each time she opened the drawer, she found another branch worth following.
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An invitation carried by the wind
The gardener planted her flowers in careful rows. The wind had other plans. It carried seeds to the path, the gate, and the narrow patch of earth beneath the kitchen window.
At first she moved the seedlings back. Then one morning she noticed a bee visiting the little flower by her doorstep. It had arrived early, before the orderly garden caught the sun. She left that one alone.
By midsummer there were flowers along the path and visitors at every bloom. When a friend asked where her garden ended, she looked from the gate to the open window. “I am beginning to think,” she said, “that it hasn’t decided yet.”
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The visitor at breakfast
Each morning, a fox appeared at the edge of the clearing just as the kettle began to sing. It never came closer. It simply sat beneath the birch, looking toward the cottage.
The woman who lived there began leaving her book closed until it arrived. She watched the light move through the leaves; the fox listened to something she could not hear. Their breakfast appointment required nothing of either of them.
One day the clearing was empty. She waited with her cup warming her hands. Then, from behind the birch, came the fox and two small shadows, tumbling over each other in the grass. She opened the window a little wider. There was more to notice now.
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The keeper of the late garden
Everyone believed the garden closed at sunset. Every evening the gate was latched, the tools were put away, and the last footsteps faded down the lane.
But a moth knew the hours that followed. It traveled from pale blossom to pale blossom, stopping where the daylight visitors had hurried past. There was a flower that opened only after the house went dark, and another whose scent arrived with the cool air.
One night the gardener returned for a forgotten scarf. She paused beside the path and watched the moth at work. The next evening she brought a chair. The garden, she discovered, had been keeping a second invitation for her.
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What the water kept
A child tried to catch the reflection of a flowering branch in a bowl. Each time she lifted the bowl, the branch disappeared, leaving only water and the pale circle of the sky.
Her grandfather sat beside the pond and waited while she tried again. At last she set the bowl down. A fallen petal floated into it. Then another.
They stayed until the light changed and the first fish returned to the surface. On the way home, she carried her little bowl carefully in both hands. She had not brought the whole tree with her. But she had something the tree had freely given, and a story about an afternoon she did not want to forget.
Discover a story behind a design