Blossom Bunny's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Blossom Bunny knelt in the meadow with a basket of daffodil bulbs and no place to plant them. She wanted the grandest daffodil garden the meadow had ever seen. Her pink and white fur was smudged with dirt. The yellow daffodil she wore on her head drooped, and so did she. Every spot she dug turned up gray, packed earth. Bulbs sown here would rot before they sprouted. She scooped a handful of soil and let it fall. Dust, not dirt. "Nothing will grow in this," she said. The sun climbed higher. If she waited much longer, the planting season would pass. One bad choice now would cost her a whole year. An old hedgehog shuffled up the path, glasses sliding down his nose. It was Professor Thornwick, the meadow's botanist. Everyone said he could ready a flower bed better than anyone alive. He carried a battered trowel and squinted at her basket. "Daffodils," he said. "Good bulbs. Bad ground." He crumbled some of her soil between his claws and let it scatter. "You could feed this patch for two seasons and still get weeds." Blossom's ears fell flat. "Then I've already lost." "I didn't say that." He pointed his trowel toward the far edge of the meadow. "There's an old cottage out past the tall grass. Nobody's lived there in years. The garden's gone wild, but the soil is black and deep. Someone loved that ground once. It never forgot." Blossom grabbed her basket. Thornwick raised a claw. "I'll come. You'll want it prepared right." They found the cottage leaning under a mess of vines. Flowers spilled from every crack. Broken boards sagged across the porch. But the beds along the walls were dark and soft, thick with old growth. Blossom pushed her paw in. The soil gave way like fresh bread. "Here," she breathed. Thornwick knelt and began pulling weeds in long, practiced sweeps. He showed her how to loosen the bed, how deep to set each bulb, how far apart. Blossom worked beside him until her paws ached. One by one, she tucked the daffodil bulbs into the rich black earth and covered them over. By dusk, every bulb was planted. Blossom sat back and looked at the neat rows. Her garden had a home at last. Then a shutter creaked above them. A curtain shifted in a cracked upstairs window. Thornwick went still. "Blossom," he said quietly. "You said nobody lived here." "That's what you told me." The front door of the abandoned cottage stood open now. It had been shut when they arrived. Blossom's bulbs were in the ground, and she could not dig them up again without killing them. Whoever's soil this was, she had just planted her whole garden in it.