In the short story “A Curtain of Green” written by Edora Welty, the womanly setting of the flower garden is mostly used to explore the relationship between fertility and death, between gardening and fiction. This short story's gardener confronts the mysterious emptiness of human understanding and attempts to agree with that irrationality. Mrs. Larkin watched her husband get killed by a falling Chinaberry Tree and has convinced herself that her love couldn’t keep him. "A ‘Curtain of Green’ concerns composition, not perception. In one sense, Mrs. Larkin can be said to author her own garden. She controls its shape; she determines whether it will sprawl in profuse growth or, as her neighbors would prefer, adhere to the bounds of propriety for an effect of restfulness.” (Burgess, paragraph 10). In her garden, Mrs. Larkin cuts, separates and ties back her plants however it pleases her. However, in the short story “Paul’s Case” written by Willa Cather, who talks about a man struggling with his personality…show more content… He would rather live in his fantasy world than face reality. Paul hated coming home after the Carnegie Hall performances because he hated his "ugly sleeping chamber with the yellow walls," (Cather 405) but most of all, he was scared of his father. “Always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread ... even when he was a little boy, it was always there ... had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something always seemed to be watching him,” (Saari, UWF Literature Resource Center) this is a primary sign that he has a disturbed home life. Furthermore, the reader figures out that Paul has no mother and the lack of affection that Paul receives at home causes him to look elsewhere for the attention that he