Flowers and Gardens

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.

The firstling of the infant year.

An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not too French French bean!

Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine,

 

The time cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.

Gardening is not a rational act.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

 

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

Unkempt about those hedges blows

Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie .

JUST LIVING IS NOT ENOUGH… ONE MUST HAVE SUNSHINE, FREEDOM, AND A LITTLE FLOWER.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

A modest garden . . . contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

Hearts are flowers; they remain open to the softly-falling dew, but shut up in the violent downpour of rain.

All gardening is landscape-painting.

Sweetheart, come see if the rose Which at morning began to unclose Its damask gown to the sun Has not lost, now the day is done, The folds of its damasked gown And its colors so like your own.

I got me flowers to strew Thy way, I got me boughs off many a tree: But Thou wast up by break of day, And brought’st Thy sweets along with Thee.

All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

 

Come into the garden, Maud,

 

Child, you are like a flower, So sweet and pure and fair. I look at you, and sadness Touches me with a prayer.

Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.