Tag Archives: Stems

820. Flowers really do intoxicate me. ~Vita Sackville-West

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  All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener’s garters, Shepherd’s purse,
Bachelor’s buttons, Lady’s smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.

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Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames–
These must all be fairy names!

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Tiny woods below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!

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Fair are grown-up people’s trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where, if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him. ~Auguste Rodin

Ah to be an artist and to be able to have conversations with the flowers, but then I talk to mine all the time, offering up praise for their beauty. Admittedly they tend to be one-sided conversations, but nodding the head demurely is an acceptable way of accepting words of admiration, is it not?! So too, when I hear the Lord speak, I bow my head in the same way the flowers do, and I pray He also sees it as an act of devoted adoration.

Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all. ~1 Chronicles 29:11  ✝

**I took the photo of the pink Hollyhock when we visited Monet’s gardens at Giverny, France. The other two images I found on Pinterest.

208. It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost… ~John Burroughs

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We feel cold, but we don’t mind it
because we will not come to harm.
And if we wrapped ourselves against the cold,
we wouldn’t feel other things,
like the bright tingle of the stars,
music of the Aurora,
or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin.
~Philip Pullman

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After last night’s winter storm, we woke to find the ground, the streets, and the rooftops covered in a solid blanket of sleet mixed with snow.  Icicles were hanging from eaves and other solid objects; branches, stems, leaves and the few remaining roses had been encapsulated in ice.  The forbidding frozen world outside was steeped in silence but for the occasional gusts of wind that sent falling leaves round and round in capricious little whirlwinds tapping softly against the icy ground.

In the coming days the garden will shrink dramatically.  It’s beauty will be harder to see, but for those who continually walk its paths with searching eyes and vivid memories, emerging treasures can be spotted and glory envisioned in places where it was and shall rise again from seeming nothingness.  During the warmer spells in the next few months, I’ll clean up the growing season’s spreading, untidy tangle and reshape her fetching figure while below in her fertile womb mysteries, ancient and sacred, are coming together to birth yet another springtime.

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm.  He said From whose womb comes the ice?  Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the water become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?  ~Job 38:1 and 29-30  ✝