Lily's Pesky Plant Read Online Free Page B

fire anywhere in the forest, my flowers let me know even before I can smell smoke. But since I planted that strange seed in my garden, the other plants seem as happy and healthy as ever.”
    Iris looked around. It was true. The garden was bursting with color. Even the leaves of the clover they were sitting in seemed greener and fuller than usual.
    “If the plant were really bad, my garden wouldn’t look so good.” Lily sighed. “But all the other fairies are so angry with me. I don’t know what to do. I want the plants in my garden to make other fairies happy, not miserable.”
    “They make me happy,” Iris said quietly. She looked down and plucked at a cloverleaf. Then she said, “I should have stood up for our plant that day when the wasps came. It was wrong that I didn’t.”
    Lily looked at her and knew that she meant it.
    “It’s okay,” she said.
    “I like gardening with you,” Iris went on. “None of the other garden fairies like to have me in their gardens. I know what they say behind my back, you know. They say I’m incomplete.”
    Lily swallowed hard. Before fairies became fairies, they were laughs. But sometimes a bit of laugh broke off and the fairy ended up with something missing. A fairy like that was called “incomplete.”
    Lily had heard other garden fairies say that about Iris. She hadn’t realized that Iris had heard it as well. Suddenly, she felt sorry about the times when she’d wished Iris would go away.
    “You’re not incomplete,” Lily told her.
    “Maybe I am,” Iris said. “I love plants as much as any garden fairy. But growing them doesn’t come naturally to me the way it does to you. You know, I fibbed about the buttercups in my garden. They weren’t as big as soup pots. In fact, they weren’t very big at all.”
    Lily looked surprised. Iris had always made a big deal about her garden.
    Iris nodded, ashamed. “I could never keep things straight in my head. Which plants need shade, which like more sun. Which plants like to be watered in the morning, and which like water at night. That’s why I started to write things down. Then I got carried away. I started to write down everything I’d ever heard about all the plants in Never Land.” She shook her head. “But I guess it’s not the same as having a garden.”
    Lily thought about this for a moment. Then she smiled. “You do have a garden,” she said.
    Iris looked confused.
    “Right here.” Lily tapped the cover of Iris’s plant book. “Your garden is on these pages. I’ll bet it has more plants than any garden in Pixie Hollow.”
    Now Iris smiled. For a while, the two fairies sat quietly with their arms hooked around their knees. They looked up at the strange, ugly plant.
    “There is something special about that plant,” Iris said at last.
    “What is that?” asked Lily.
    “It made us friends,” Iris replied.

    That night after dinner, Lily went once more to her garden. She stood for a long time looking at the mysterious plant.
    “Where did you come from?” she murmured. “What are you? Why are you causing so many problems?”
    A breeze blew. A few more grains of pollen drifted down from the flower. Lily sneezed three times in a row. Ah-choo! Ah-choo! Ah-choo!
    The wind shifted, and suddenly Lily sensed a change in the garden. The buttercups, the grass, the lavender, even the mysterious plant all seemed alert. It was as if they were waiting for something.
    A raindrop fell from the sky. It landed on Lily’s head, soaking her hair. More raindrops splashed on the ground around her.
    Rain! Around Lily, the plants began to perk up. This was what they had been waiting for.

    The rain came down harder. Lily stretched out her arms and let herself get drenched. The rain washed the pink pollen out of her hair and off her skin.
    By the time Lily left the garden, her wings were too wet to fly. She had to walk all the way back to the Home Tree. But she didn’t mind.
    That night, she stayed up late. She watched the