You love me – you are sure –

I shall not fear mistake –

I shall not cheated wake –

Some grinning morn –

To find the Sunrise left –

And Orchards – unbereft –

And Dollie – gone!

I need not start – you’re sure –

That night will never be –

When frightened – home to Thee I run –

To find the windows dark –

And no more Dollie – mark –

Quite none?

Be sure you’re sure – you know –

I’ll bear it better now –

If you’ll just tell me so –

Than when – a little dull Balm grown –

Over this pain of mine –

You sting – again!

By Emily Dickinson

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Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest;
Home-keeping hearts are happiest,
For those that wander they know not where
Are full of trouble and full of care;
       To stay at home is best.

Weary and homesick and distressed,
They wander east, they wander west,
And are baffled and beaten and blown about
By the winds of the wilderness of doubt;
       To stay at home is best.

Then stay at home, my heart, and rest;
The bird is safest in its nest;
O’er all that flutter their wings and fly
A hawk is hovering in the sky;
       To stay at home is best.
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The Flower at My Window by Lucian B. Watkins

O! my heart now feels so cheerful as I go with footsteps light
In the daily toil of my dear home;
And I’ll tell to you the secret that now makes my life so bright—
There’s a flower at my window in full bloom.
It is radiant in the sunshine, and so cheerful after rain;
And it wafts upon the air its sweet perfume.
It is very, very lovely! May its beauties never wane—
This dear flower at my window in full bloom.
Nature has so clothed it in such glorious array,
And it does so cheer our home, and hearts illume;
Its dear mem’ry I will cherish though the flower fade away—
This dear flower at my window in full bloom.
Oft I gaze upon this flower with its blossoms pure and white.
And I think as I behold its gay costume,
While through life we all are passing may our lives be always bright
Like this flower at my window in full bloom.

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Let It Be Forgotten by Sara Teasdale

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long forgotten snow.

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There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale  (War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

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Spring Morning by Marion Strobel

O day—if I could cup my hands and drink of you,
And make this shining wonder be
A part of me!
O day! O day!
You lift and sway your colors on the sky
Till I am crushed with beauty. Why is there
More of reeling sunlit air
Than I can breathe? Why is there sound
In silence? Why is a singing wound
About each hour?
And perfume when there is no flower?
O day! O Day! How may I press
Nearer to loveliness?

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“She wished she had a little yellow house of her own, with a flower box full of real flowers and herbs –pansies and rosemary – and a sweet lover who would swing dance with her in the evenings and cook pasta and read poetry aloud.” ~ Francesca Lia Block

“I pray, what flowers are these? The pansy this, O, that’s for lover’s thoughts.” ~ George Chapman

“Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.” ~ Carl Sandburg

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“I find a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.” ~ Madame Jehane Benoit

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“Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare, and left the flushed

 print in a poppy there.” ~ Francis Thompson

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“The normal food of man is vegetable.” ~ Charles Darwin

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“Involve myself with a patch of ground in that real world of humanity does not live by books alone. Even a little bit of gardening reminded me that labor informs the self as nothing else can … If we develop wonder, enjoy it, and follow its promptings, our wants will be fewer and our needs plainer.”  ~ Stephanie Mills

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“RED GERANIUMS” by Martha Haskell Clark
Life did not bring me silken gowns,
Nor jewels for my hair,
Nor signs of gabled foreign towns
In distant countries fair,
But I can glimpse, beyond my pane, a green and friendly hill,
And red geraniums aflame upon my window sill.

The brambled cares of everyday,
The tiny humdrum things,
May bind my feet when they would stray,
But still my heart has wings
While red geraniums are bloomed against my window glass,
And low above my green-sweet hill the gypsy wind-clouds pass.

And if my dreamings ne’er come true,
The brightest and the best,
But leave me lone my journey through,
I’ll set my heart at rest,
And thank God for home-sweet things, a green and friendly hill,
And red geraniums aflame upon my window sill.

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“There is no ‘The End’ to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished; a painter can frame his picture, a composer notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move.” ~ Mirabel Osler

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“We have learned that more of the “earth-earthiness” would solve our social problems, remove many isms from our vocabulary, and purify our art. And so we often wish that those who interpret life for us by pen or brush would buy a trowel and pack of seeds.” ~ Ruth R. Blodgett

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“Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.” ~ Sir Walter Scott

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“For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.” ~ Edwin Way Teale

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“Winter dies into the spring, to be born again in the autumn.” ~ Terri Guillemets

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“Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.” ~ Chad Sugg

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Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry — eating in late September.

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“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are wound together. All things connect.” ~ Chief Seattle

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The woods begin to vibrate with gathering and preparation. 

The sounds so crisp, electric.

Her words were “I felt the air change today.”

Red, orange, yellow, green, brown.

They dance while falling.

A choreographed waltz.

Every year she said “I felt the air change today.”

Beautiful, breathtaking, loyal.

The Canvas.

I think I felt the air change today.

~Rachel Leigh Phelps Dickus~

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~”Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one doesn’t have to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.” ~ Garrison Keillor

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~”Morning is the best of all times in the garden. The sun is not yet hot. Sweet vapors rise from the earth. Night dew clings to the soil and makes plants glisten. Birds call to one another. Bees are already at work.” ~ Emily Dickinson

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“Gardeners, like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by.”
– Allen Lacy, The Gardener’s Eye, 1992, p. 16

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“A waist is a terrible thing to mind.”

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“I kiss better than I cook.”

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“Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.”

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“Wine is bottled poetry.”

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“My life is like a stroll on the beach, as near the ocean’s edge as I can go.”  Henry David Thoreau

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¬ Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all. ¬      Emily Dickinson

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“Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don’t unravel.”

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An Old Man’s Winter Night
by Robert Frost

All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon—such as she was,
So late-arising—to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

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“In our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh