High Places

Frost

Frost is the greatest artist in our clime
He paints in nature and describes in rime

Thomas Wood 1799-1845

Miscellaneous

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Cottage Garden

If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need

Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you are going to live by a river, make friends with the crocodile

Indian Proverb

There's music in the sighing of a reed.
There's music in the gushingof a rill.
There's music in all things, if men had ears.
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.

Lord Byron

Bluebells

Men stopped giving her flowers.

In her garden, frosted and dried,

the winter plants were a lifetime's

spent bouquets.

She needed to give herself a present.

A bathroom with no mirrors,

white towels to wallow in,

a tub deep enough for remembering.

She had to find the perfect blue,

not iris, not midnight,

the sky's watchfulness

two minutes before dark.

In the paint shop

the young man listened carefully "

mixed lilac, cobalt, amethyst,

a practised conjuror.

They saw it spin into colour,

or he did, she watched

the blackness of his hair.

No grey, he must be half her age.

His eyes when he noticed her

were a quick green sea change.

I can tell he said, when you dream,

you dream of bluebells

Kate Rhodes

Winter Trees

Winter Trees

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing.
Memories growing, ring on ring,
A series of weddings. Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waist-deep in history.
Full of wings, otherworldliness.
In this, they are Ledas.
O mother of leaves and sweetness
Who are these pietas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.

Sylvia Plath

Snow

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued

Robert Frost

Ode to a Snowdrop

The Snow-Drop

The snow-drop, Winter's timid child,
Awakes to life bedew'd with tears;
And flings around its fragrance mild,
And where no rival flowrets bloom,
Amidst the bare and chilling gloom,
A beauteous gem appears!

Poor flow'r! On thee the sunny beam
No touch of genial warmth bestows;
Except to thaw the icy stream
Whose little current purls along,
Thy fair and glossy charms among,
And whelms thee as it flows.

Where'er I find thee, gentle flow'r,
Thou still art sweet, and dear to me!
For I have known the cheerless hour,
Have seen the sun-beams cold and pale,
Have felt the chilling wint'ry gale,
And wept, and shrunk like thee!

Mary Robinson (1757 - 1800)