Along the footpath the cornflowers have opened a quiet shop of sky. Each corolla waits for a scrap of blue no larger than a postage stamp, greets the nearest cloud, nods to the daisy next door, and only then turns a little bluer by one petal.
We asked at the kiosk. "I stood still so the cloud would not miss its hello," said a neighbor with a paper of seeds. "They are not greedy. If the sky is busy they wait. The extra blue is small enough to keep in a buttonhole and does not drip on the way home."
The park keeper pinned a card to the fence: scraps after one polite greeting. Guests may admire. Guests may not pick. A bumblebee came back the next morning, sat through a second fitting, and left with pollen that looked very much like a tiny weather report.