Breath in your nostrils,
light in your eyes,
flowers at your feet,
duties at your hand,
the path of right just before you.Then do not grasp at the stars,
but do life’s plain, common work as it comes,
certain that daily duties and daily bread
are the sweetest things in life.~Robert Louis Stevenson
Tag: rhododendron
Constant Friends
“In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.”
~ Kozuko Okakura
We spent a rainy afternoon touring the estate house and gardens at Mount Stewart on the eastern most peninsula in Northern Ireland while the rest of the country here was steeped in heavy security for the G8 Summit happening and President Obama’s arrival in Belfast with his family. We decided to bypass all the politics and find something beautiful. We succeeded.
Flowers are present for our most emotional times of life–to celebrate birth and comfort the dying, to show love and celebrate life long unions. They are a universal language, no matter the country. During our visit to Japan, the whole country was preparing for the annual festivals celebrating sakura, the cherry blossoms that are so beloved there. Here in Ireland, spring is late this year, so today we got to enjoy azaleas and rhododendrons and peonies all over again, as they are completely done blooming at home.
We are thrilled to find our floral friends blooming richly here, even with the stress and troubles of the recent decades in Northern Ireland, and the current economic struggles here and elsewhere. If the G8 Summiteers have trouble reaching any agreement, they just need to go find a garden to cultivate together. Voltaire understood that several centuries ago; we need to remind ourselves now that the best of friends will be constant through joy and sorrow.
BriarCroft in Spring
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”
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
At morn when light mine eyes unsealed
I gazed upon the open field;
The rain had fallen in the night —
The landscape in the new day’s light
A countenance of grace revealed
Upon the meadow, wood and height.
The sun’s light was a smile of gold,
Ere shut by sudden fold on fold
Of surging, showering clouds from view;
No sooner hid than it broke through
A tearful smile upon the wold
Where earth reflected heaven’s blue.
The sky was as a canvas spun
To paint the new spring’s nocturns on;
A blended melody of tints —
The sea’s hue, and the myriad hints
Of garden-closes, when the sun
Hath stamped the work of nature’s mints.
~William Stanley Braithwaite
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
Barnstorming 