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The Gardener's Ledger
10th grade reading
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The Gardener's Ledger
My father kept two books. The first was the ledger in which he recorded every coin that passed through the shop: the price of flour, the cost of the new awning, the debts that customers swore they would settle by Friday. He wrote in it every evening, in a small, upright hand, and he never let anyone else touch it.
The second book I did not discover until after he died. It was a cheap school exercise book, its cover soft with handling, hidden at the back of the shed behind the seed trays. Inside, in the same upright hand, he had recorded something quite different: the date the first snowdrop appeared each year; the night a fox had dug up the tulips; the morning, in 1987, when "M. laughed at the robin on the spade and said it was the bravest bird in England." M. was my mother. I had never heard my father mention her laugh.
For forty years, it seemed, he had been keeping accounts of another kind – of small, unprofitable things that added up to a life. The shop ledger balanced to the penny. The garden book did not balance at all. There were gaps of months, sometimes years. In 1993, the year my mother died, there is only one entry: "Rain."
I used to think my father was a man who cared only for what could be counted. I sat in that cold shed until the light went, reading his small, careful sentences, and understood that I had been reading the wrong book.
Question 1
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". How do the two books differ?
- A. One records money precisely; the other records personal moments and feelings.
- B. One is written by the father, the other by the mother.
- C. One is about the garden; the other is about the weather only.
- D. Both record the shop's accounts.
Question 2
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". What does the single entry "Rain." in 1993 most likely suggest?
- A. the father's overwhelming grief after his wife's death
- B. that 1993 was a very dry year
- C. that the father stopped gardening for good
- D. that he had forgotten to write
Question 3
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". What does the narrator mean by "keeping accounts of another kind"?
- A. running a second shop
- B. counting the plants for sale
- C. hiding money from the family
- D. recording things that mattered emotionally rather than financially
Question 4
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". "The shop ledger balanced to the penny. The garden book did not balance at all." What is the effect of this contrast?
- A. It shows the father was bad at maths.
- B. It suggests life and love cannot be neatly measured like money.
- C. It proves the shop was failing.
- D. It shows the garden was untidy.
Question 5
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". How does the narrator's view of the father change?
- A. from seeing him as concerned only with money to recognising his hidden tenderness
- B. from respecting him to pitying his business skills
- C. from loving him to resenting him
- D. from not knowing him to knowing only his shop
Question 6
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". What does the final phrase "I had been reading the wrong book" mean?
- A. He had misread the shop accounts.
- B. He had judged his father by the wrong evidence.
- C. He had borrowed the wrong library book.
- D. He should have studied gardening.
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