How to show your love for the prettiest girl in the dairy?   As a gardener, you obviously present your avowals through delicious strawberries and outstanding peas.

Sadly for her later suffering, Hetty was unmoved, preferring more glamorous and glittering attentions.

‘Mr Craig, the gardener at the Chase, was over head and ears in love with her, and had lately made unmistakable avowals in luscious strawberries and hyperbolical peas.’

Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 141

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