"Pioneering with Wildflowers" by George Aiken

My mother gave me George Aiken's "Pioneering with Wildflowers" when I was ten. I still have it. Aiken self-published the book in 1933, before he was elected Governor of Vermont. He was later Senator from Vermont from 1941 to 1977. He was that rare thing- a progressive Republican, and he stood with the little man against monopolies- banks, marble and granite companies. A man who loved wildflowers, and his country. A man famous for saying of the Vietnam disaster that the US should just declare victory and come home.

My old book is stained, and inside are the notes of an 11 year old girl who had just built a lathe house for growing wildflowers on the edge of her father's vegetable garden on an old farm on the banks of the Little Sugar River in North Charlestown, New Hampshire. That child was me.

A great man to remember, especially when New England now sends former male models who posed nude on the cover of Playgirl to the US Senate.