Flowers and Gardens

Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine,

 

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

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

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

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

 

Come into the garden, Maud,

 

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.

 

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.

 

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Manibus date lilia plenis .

Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie .

I hate flowers—I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

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.

And a rose, she lived as roses do, the space of a morn.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Pleasure for one hour, a bottle of wine. Pleasure for one year a marriage; but pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

Earth laughs in flowers.

The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.

The flower has no weekday self, dressed as it always is in Sunday clothes.