A young boy with no mother was given seeds by his tutor, who told the boy that if he planted them, they would become tall trees. The boy planted the seeds as told, in a line, excited to be on a visit to an estate that would one day be his. He went past the pond and down the lane from which all the carriages to the estate came, planting one seed after another. He was enjoying his task, this rare chance to be outside, but could hear his father’s voice in the distance scolding the tutor, and the boy too, for this foolish distraction when the child could be studying math.

Disappointed that the seeds did not become trees right away, the boy forgot about them. But when the boy returned to the estate as a man years later, there were trees where the seeds had once been, linden trees, tall, grand, to be seen by all who approached the house, friend or intruder. By a miracle, not even Napoleon Bonaparte and his grande armée had damaged the trees marching past them to Moscow in 1812.

The man discovered that each spring, on the shiny new green leaves, there were insect galls of the brightest and richest pink. These small, curved spikes were so tiny that the man had to hold them close to his face and strain his eyes to see them at all, and they went quite unnoticed by almost everyone else. The insect galls grew right out of the leaf and were stuck to it, plant and insect combined so tightly they would not detach without the leaf tearing, each essential for the other to thrive.