Plants Grow with Your Love　随爱而生长

■薛翔 选注

Sally had lived abroad most of her life, but at last she came back to England to live. She had always loved trees and flowers, and now she aimed to1 buy a small house in the country with a garden. She had managed to2 save quite a lot of money while working in hospitals in foreign countries, so she hoped to be able to buy something nice.

"You know," she said to her sister Alice, "it was very difficult indeed to have an English garden in any of the countries I worked in, because of the heat and the dryness."

Alice, who was not at all interested in gardens and preferred life indoors,3 pretended to be sympathetic,4 but she was secretly thinking that it would be nice to live in a country where one had none of the troubles she had with her garden.

But Sally continued to be keen,5 and soon she had found a suitable place in a nice row of houses at the edge of a quite big garden. "I very much wanted a place near a small village shop," she said to Alice, "chiefly for when I'm too old to drive my car any more."6

Sally moved into her new house, and began to work on the garden. It had not been very well looked after by the last owners, so that the grass on lawn was rough and in need of a lot of work,7 and the whole garden was full of weeds.8 It was a big job to make everything look as neat as Sally wanted it to be, especially as she could not afford to9 employ a gardener, and she was very much against chemicals to kill weeds, as they also killed some of the birds and butterflies she loved to see.

At last she had got rid of most of the weeds, except in one corner of her garden, where she allowed them to grow freely behind a hedge10 because some kinds of butterflies liked them very much.
"Do you know," she said to Alice, "there are so few suitable weeds for certain butterflies in any of the gardens in this part of the country that they have almost disappeared here."

"And I read in a magazine," answered Alice, "that some people believe that, if you think nice thoughts about your plants11 and really love them, they will grow much better, but if you think bad thoughts about them, they will never get big and strong. Unfortunately, people who believe this never explain why most of the weeds grow so well when people hate them so much."

1. aim to: 打算要。
2. manage to: 设法做到。
3. 她对花园一点兴趣也没有，她更喜欢在屋里呆着。not at all: 一点也不；prefer: 更喜爱。
4. sympathetic/;simp2#8etik/: 赞同的，支持的。
5. keen: 热衷的，渴望的。
6. 主要是为我以后老得开不动车作准备。
7. 草坪的草长得乱七八糟的，得要好好修一修了。rough/r7f/: 蓬乱的。
8. weed: 杂草，野草。
9. afford to: [常接在can, be able to后]担负得起（费用）。
10. hedge/hed3/: 树篱。
11. 你对自己种的植物怀有美好的愿望。