Heart of the Garden

It’s about time we stopped quoting John Muir and captioning our instagram posts with “The earth laughs in flowers” because Emerson wasn’t being romantic with the actual intention of that over-quoted poem anyway. Here is a list of voices and faces that deserve some voicetime and facetime. This list is a work in progress and it is ever-evolving. There are a few white dudes peppered in because they offer authentically good and useful words, so let’s include them. But let’s also be mindful of Restorative Representation (did I make that up?) at the same time.

One challenge in writing about gardens and gardening is trying to dive a little deeper than just showing a picture and typing a caption about the physical aspects of what’s in the picture. Also, there aren’t nearly enough synonyms for the word “blooms!” Sometimes you really just need a quote from a public figure to contextualize the visual. And it is not always easy to make the visual and verbal align. You might have a great quote that you’re dying to use, but you can’t find an appropriate image to illustrate it. Or you might have a great image and words are just redundant or discordant.

I hope these words cast a line to connect you to other ways of interpreting your plant feed! I start off with Anne Spencer because she is the queen of garden poetry and so many other amazing things, of course. I reiterate, this is a work in progress. And now to work on more progress.

Inspirational

Earth, I thank you
for the pleasure of your language
You’ve had a hard time
bringing it to me
from the ground
to grunt thru the noun
To all the way
feeling seeing smelling touching
–awareness
I am here!
-Anne Spencer, “Earth, I thank you”

“Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.”
-Lucille Clifton

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope. 
-Maya Angelou

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
-Barbara Kingsolver

Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.
-Gwendolyn Brooks, Winnie

When Sun leaves at dusk, it makes a doorway. We have access to ancestors, to eternity. Breathe out. Ask for forgiveness. Let all hurts and failures go. Let them go.
-Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir 

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
-George Washington Carver

I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain.
-Robin Wall Kimmerer

This is the urgency: Live!
And have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

The oak tarries long in the depths of the seed
But swift is the season of nettle and weed,
Abide yet awhile in the mellowing shade
And rise with the hour for which you were made.
The cycle of seasons, the tidals of man,
Revolve in the orb of the infinite plan;
We move to the rhythm of ages long done,
And each has his hour — to dwell in the sun!
-Georgia Douglas Johnson

The most important thing is to hold that tiny spark of life, if it is in a bud, in a seed, that is our work, to hold on to life, so when spring comes back, there can be growth.
-Robin Wall Kimmerer

This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.
-Robin Wall Kimmerer

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
-Toni Morrison

All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
-Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower 

Paradise is one’s own place,
One’s own people,
One’s own world,
Knowing and known,
Perhaps even
Loving and loved.
-Octavia Butler

Gardens

He said…Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love.
-Anne Spencer

Trees 

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
-Joyce Kilmer

The act of survival in any living thing is its center, no matter where it is pushed or pulled, no matter how many years aged in lines on the skin, wrinkles and folds, in rings you don’t see until they are irrevocably severed.
-Tommy Orange

A tree’s wood is also its memoir … If you know how to listen, each ring describes how the rain fell and the wind blew and the sun appeared every day at dawn.
-Hope Jahren

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.
-Hope Jahren

Like olive groves, bonsai trees bring to the surface what is harder to discern elsewhere: that human lives and tree lives are made, always, from relationship.
-David George Haskell 

Wood is an embodied conversation between plant life, shudder of ground, and yaw of wind.
-David George Haskell 

…Living memories of trees, manifest in their songs, tell of life’s community, a net of relations. 
-David George Haskell

Nature

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
-Alice Walker

Shhh. . . . Don’t make a sound. Wait patiently. Your wild soul has a shy side. Approach it as you would any wild animal —quietly, unnoticed. Only then will it reveal itself to you.
-Mary Thompson

Discovery and mischief are two sides of the very same coin.
-Hope Jahren

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
-Rachel Carson

Can you sense how the whole of creation is altered by your presence? Take one step into the woods and listen.
-Mary Thompson

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.
-Jimmy Carter

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel.
-Aldo Leopold

I am comforted by life’s stability, by earth’s unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
-Pearl S. Buck

I believe the best way to begin reconnecting humanity’s heart, mind, and soul to nature is for us to share our individual stories.
-J. Drew Lanham

From dandelions to daffodils, from ferns to figs, from potatoes to pine trees—every plant growing on land is striving toward two prizes: light, which comes from above, and water, which comes from below.”
-Hope Jahren

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
-Kahlil Gibran

Let us be silent awhile and listen to nature.
-Frederick Douglas

Birds 

A light and diplomatic bird
Is lenient in my window tree.
A quick dilemma of the leaves
Discloses twist and tact to me.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

People everywhere are enchanted with the birds’ beauty, soothing songs, and apparently gentle natures.
-J. Drew Lanham

Wildflowers cling where they can. Their colors ripen and rejoice, gathering bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Yet how carelessly we pave over them— these precious teachers of how to grow wild, beautiful, free.
-Mary Thompson

A light and diplomatic bird
Is lenient in my window tree.
A quick dilemma of the leaves
Discloses twist and tact to me.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

Environmental

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free.
-Aldo Leopold

Trying to do what’s best by nature is a guessing game with long-term stakes. Good decisions mean that the soil and water will prosper. The trees will prosper. The wild things will prosper. In that natural prospering all of us will become wealthier in richer dawn choruses and endless golden sunsets.
-J. Drew Lanham

When people are unfettered there is no limit to what the world stands to gain when each person’s potential and brilliance are allowed to shine and take flight.
-Charlotte Blake Alston

Because life is network, there is no ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’ separate and apart from humans.
-David George Haskell

Water 

From clouds and rainfall to streams and creeks, lakes and ponds, the sea and back again to the heavens, water is the lifeblood of us all. 
-J. Drew Lanham

Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth, and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world.
-Brenda Peterson

Waterfalls wouldn’t sound so melodious if there were no rocks in their way.
-Rishabh Gautam

I can see my rainbow calling me through the misty breeze of my waterfall.
-Jimi Hendrix

The idea is that flowing water never goes stale, so just keep on flowing.
-Bruce Lee

Fall

Blaze on blaze of scarlet sumach,
Roadsides lined with radiant gold,
Purple ironweed, regal, slender,
Rasping locust, shrill and bold.
-Esse V. Hathaway

Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
-Emily Brontë

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonize.
-George Eliot

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
-F. Scott Fitzergerald 

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
-Mary Oliver, Song for Autumn

The rusty leaves crunch and crackle,
Blue haze hangs from the dimmed sky,
The fields are matted with sun-tanned stalks —
Wind rushes by.
The last red berries hang from the thorn-tree,
The last red leaves fall to the ground.
Bleakness, through the trees and bushes,
Comes without sound.
-Joan Mitchell

Today I walked on lion-coloured hills
with only cypresses for company,
until the sunset caught me, turned the brush
to copper,
set the clouds
to one great roof of flame
above the earth,
so that I walked through fire, beneath fire,
and all in beauty.
-Elizabeth Coatsworth, On The Hills

Winter

Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.
-Mary Oliver

Spring

A flower is no flower
mist no mist
that which comes at midnight
leaves at dawn,
arrives like a spring dream – for a while
leaves like a morning cloud – nowhere to be found
-Bai Juyi, A flower is no flower (Tang Dynasty)

I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florists’ shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops
And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made,—
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.
And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.
-Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

But now, in spring, the buds   
flock our trees.   Ten million exquisite buds,   
tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,   
bellowing from ashen branches vibrant   
keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart,   
dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.   
The song is drink, is color.   Come.   Now.   Taste.
-Camille Dungy, What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

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Longform Poems that I have to include that shouldn’t be cut into pieces

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
-Lucille Clifton

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark
morning streets, I point and name.
Look, the sycamores, their mottled,
paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves
rusting and crisping at the edges.
I walk through Schiller Park with you
on my chest. Stars smolder well
into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,
the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.
Fall is when the only things you know
because I’ve named them
begin to end. Soon I’ll have another
season to offer you: frost soft
on the window and a porthole
sighed there, ice sleeving the bare
gray branches. The first time you see
something die, you won’t know it might
come back. I’m desperate for you
to love the world because I brought you here.
-Maggie Smith

In the wood I hear the beautiful

call of bird I do not know     I wish

I knew the names of birds

and could identify them by their songs

It would be so much nicer to say

I heard the warble of a wood pigeon

as the red floor of the woodland

stretched before me like an avenue

through the high rises of beeches and oaks

as I walk on the path and feel the soft cushion

feel my foot press down into the flesh of the duff

because

a name is

reassurance

a comfort in the flesh

to hold

these songs in the trees

so something could be mine

warble trill bell fluting?

something nearly right

-Jason Allen-Paisant, Naming