Little flower, but if I could understand what you are, root and all in all, I should know what God and man is.
~ Tennyson
Am I root, or am I bud? Am I stem or am I leaf? All in all, these are not me
but signs of God’s fruiting glory.
I am but the tears He shed as He broke
into blossom.
Awake! Awake! for the earliest gleam
Of golden sunlight shines
On the rippling waves, that brightly flow
Beneath the flowering vines.
Awake! Awake! for the low, sweet chant
Of the wild-birds’ morning hymn
Comes floating by on the fragrant air,
Through the forest cool and dim;
Then spread each wing,
And work, and sing,
Through the long, bright sunny hours;
O’er the pleasant earth
We journey forth,
For a day among the flowers.
~Louisa May Alcott Lily-Bell and Thistledown Song I
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.
~John Galsworthy
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and green world all together,
Star-eyed strawberry breasted
Throstle above Her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within,
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.”
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, The May Magnificat
“A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.
Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;
For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?”
– Sara Teasdale, May Day
“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.”
– Ellis Peters
“Some will tell you crocuses are heralds true of spring
Others say that tulips showing buds are just the thing
Point to peonies, say when magnolia blossoms show
I look forward to the sight of other flowers though
Cultivate your roses, grow your orchids in the dark
Plant your posies row on row and stink up the whole park
The flower that’s my favourite kind is found throughout the land
A wilting, yellow dandelion, clutched in a grubby hand.”
– Larry Tilander, Springtime of My Soul
“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.”
– Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring
“Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.”
– Carl Sandburg
“With the coming of spring, I am calm again. “
– Gustav Mahler
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
~Anton Chekhov
“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.”
– D. H. Lawrence, The Enkindled Spring
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
– Robert Frost
“Hark, I hear a robin calling!
List, the wind is from the south!
And the orchard-bloom is falling
Sweet as kisses on the mouth.
Come and let us seek together
Springtime lore of daffodils,
Giving to the golden weather
Greeting on the sun-warm hills.”
– Lucy Maud Montgomery, Spring Song
“If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.”
– Audra Foveo
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
– Mark Twain
“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”
– Dorothy Parker 😉
See BriarCroft in Summer, in Autumn, in Winter,
at Year’s End
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps there are places where spring blooms are reckless and shrieking in the night but the tulip fields in Skagit County, just south of where we live, is not one of them.
This is the home of carefully blended choral floral voices, harmonious and joyful, singing together to create a symphony of unforgettable visual grandeur.
In the heart of the night, there is only the contented hum of rows and rows of purring color stirring in the valley breezes, waiting for the dawn.
I let her garden go.
let it go, let it go
How can I watch the hummingbird
Hover to sip
With its beak’s tip
The purple bee balm — whirring as we heard
It years ago?
The weeds rise rank and thick
let it go, let it go
Where annuals grew and burdock grows,
Where standing she
At once could see
The peony, the lily, and the rose
Rise over brick
She’d laid in patterns. Moss
let it go, let it go
Turns the bricks green, softening them
By the gray rocks
Where hollyhocks
That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem,
Blossom with loss.
~ Donald Hall from “Her Garden” about Jane Kenyon
Some gray mornings
heavy with clouds
and tear-streaked windows
I pause melancholy
at the passage of time.
Whether to grieve over
another hour passed
another breath exhaled
another broken heart beat
Or to climb my way
out of deepless dolor
and start the work of
planting the next garden
It takes sweat
and dirty hands
and yes,
tears from heaven
to make it flourish
but even so
just maybe
my memories
so carefully planted
might blossom fully
in the soil of loss.
April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay
Welcome, wild harbinger of spring!
To this small nook of earth;
Feeling and fancy fondly cling
Round thoughts which owe their birth
To thee, and to the humble spot
Where chance has fixed thy lowly lot.
~Bernard Barton—To a Crocus.
Hail to the King of Bethlehem,
Who weareth in his diadem
The yellow crocus for the gem
Of his authority!
Longfellow—Christus. Pt. II. The Golden Legend. IX.
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~John Lubbock
It will not always be summer; build barns.
~Hesiod
tree house in the walnut tree
Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
~ Harper Lee in Too Kill a Mockingbird
‘Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
Thomas More
poplar row
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
~William Shakespeare
“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
I admire the honey bee’s ability to become pollinator and pollen gatherer simultaneously, facilitating new fruit from the blossom as well as making sweet honey that carries the spicy essence of the flower touched.
As a physician, I wish I might be as transformative in the work I do every day. I carry with me tens of thousands of patients I’ve seen over thirty years of medical practice. There is no way I can touch another human being without keeping some small part of them with me–a memory of an open wound or the scar it left behind, a word of sorrow or gratitude, a grimace, a tear or a smile. Each is a flower visited, some still in bud, some in full bloom, some seed pods ready to burst, some spent and wilting and ready to fall away. Each carries a spicy vitality, even in their illness and dying, that is unforgettable and still clings to me. It has been my privilege to be thoroughly dusted by those I’ve loved and cared for. I want to carry that on to create something wonderful.
Each patient changes me, the doctor, readying me for the next patient by teaching me a gentler approach, a clearer explanation, a slower leave-taking. Their story becomes part of my story, adding to my skill as a healer, and never to be forgotten.
Physicians do have blessings in the work they do, you know, and if they don’t they should, for they are dusted with stories from a million patients visited.
Nothing could smell as spicy and nothing could taste as sweet.
One day in summer
when everything
has already been more than enough
the wild beds start
exploding open along the berm
of the sea; day after day
you sit near them; day after day
the honey keeps on coming
in the red cups and the bees
like amber drops roll
in the petals: there is no end,
believe me! to the inventions of summer,
to the happiness your body
is willing to bear.
– Mary Oliver “The Roses”
“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
A rainy summer yields abundant shade-loving blossoms. Continuous cloud cover and plenty of moisture may subdue a summer mood but not in the case of begonias, fuchsia, and impatiens. Their vivid colors are happily chanting playground rhymes, when not singing arias, reciting epic poetry, and laughing uproariously while partying hardy into the night.
If they were fragrance instead of colors, they would be a perfume shop full of perfectly coiffed matrons who trail scents behind them. If they were tactile instead of colors, they would be plush velveteen cushions topped with purring cats with switching tails. If they were taste instead of colors, they would be spice and pepper-hot to the point of tears.
Their reckless blooming abandon is enough in itself to make me weep, without noisy parties, chilis, heavy scents, or ruffled cat fur needed.
No sun required. No tropical temperatures. No promise of 18 hours of daylight.
They simply have enough of what they need to give all they’ve got. All I need to do is show up, open my eyes and believe.
Barnstorming 