Poet Laura: Gardens and Grandpa

Now that spring is edging into parts of the country, clearly arrived here in Texas, gardening becomes a welcome part of our lives. Even in a city apartment, there’s an urge for a new plant at the window or dressing a balcony in greenery. In the past two or three years, it has been so hot and dry where I live, that I chose to plant nothing except a few annuals in patio pots, but this year I braved a few tomato plants, radishes, and strawberries in a shadier spot (despite “full sun” mandates). I am grateful for the recent cool nights that encourage growth and blossoming.

I spent my young years living with my grandparents and near my great-grandparents who had sold their big farm and moved next door. Such wonderful moments of life gifted me by four special people who’d only known living off the land. Those early years grounded me before my mother remarried and we moved overseas. As a young girl, my sister and I spent many an hour sitting at a fruit stand along the highway in front of Grandma’s house. As the truckers would honk and wave at us, we peddled pints of strawberries, raspberries, and green beans, baskets of fresh sweet corn, squash, and onions. We’d shell peas with Grandma on her back porch.

Gardening is demanding work, but it is also ritual. The planting, the weeding, the watering—the tending to nature’s creation. On the other hand, the beauty of wildlands and native grasses needs no tending except the sun, soil, and showers. Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s great poem, Digging, eloquently brings to light the toil and the tradition of working the land, as versed in this excerpt from Heaney’s poem.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

—from Seamus Heaney’s Digging

Heaney’s poem delves into the duty of work and the bond with his father and lineage. My grandmother’s parents both came from families that farmed the land along the Delaware River since the 1700s. It’s in the blood, though a “green thumb” was not passed along to me. But I saw my grandmother feed hobos on the back porch. I saw her root cellar and understood how they lived more comfortably than most through the Depression. Gardening connects us to the soil, but it also joins us to the world beyond and before us.

Grandpa’s Garden

Russell was Grandma’s second husband,
the only one I knew, but he held an aura
of stories and the spiral labyrinth of nature.

The seasons lived within him
like an almanac, and he knew when
to wed the pea and the soil in the spring rains

and how to coddle a chick beneath a warm bulb.
The clouds cordially chatted with him
of how the storms would weave the sunshine,

and Grandpa charmed the crows to abandon
nibbling his cherry trees in a magical kingdom
where the gardens loved him

as if paramours perennially returning
to the husbandry of Grandpa’s unruffled devotion.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

Grandpa, in beret (he loved his hats) late in life,
proud of his fall garden’s gifts.

Scottish poet Muriel Stuart was born in 1885 in London and wrote a book called Gardner’s Nightcap. Here is her evocative poem about the hope held in a seed.

The Seed-Shop

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry —
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century’s streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

—Muriel Stuart

Stuart’s poem speaks to me, for there is magic in gardens. It’s the mystery—where life emerges from a husk, from a thing that appears to be nothing at all. Her words bring to mind the tumbleweeds that blow across the plains, the highways, caught in barbed fences or scratched my legs on a windy day when I lived in Amarillo. I once wrote a poem about them, a haibun:

Tumbled Thistle

When winter wails through the plains, the thistle weeds roll, spin, tangle into orbs.
Prairie winds carry them far till grasped in barbed wire and shrub, or unhindered, the
sundry spheres sail on and on and on to the west. They are truly cadavers, assembled
as if a reunion of ghosts, for the thistle has died. Yet, the trolling tumbleweeds
migrate beyond like a roving meadow, where only the diaspores remain, rootless and
free within bramble, propelling their progeny to seed the great earth.

Fetched wild in grim gusts,
tumbled orbs strew sanguine seeds
to sprout tall in fields.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

Gardening is more than sustenance—it includes flower beds, and poet and musician Patience Strong, born in 1907 in England, found a bond in nature. A popular quote of this author: “I thought I had finished with romantic adventures, but half-way through life and well past the age for losing one’s heart, I was suddenly swept off my feet by a new love, a passionate, tyrannical, all-absorbing emotion: the love of a garden.”

I am amused by the secrecy of bulbs, like hide-and-seek. How they live deep in darkness and know when to rise, to blossom, and then return to the void again until next year, so here is Patience Strong’s poem about bulbs:

Bulbs

I’ve put my bulbs in coloured bowls and hidden them away —
Inside my cupboard, where they cannot see the light of day —
I’ve put them in the soft black mould as cosy as can be —
And in the quiet darkness they will work their mystery…

And when all things lie lifeless locked in winter’s frozen sleep —
Inside my cupboard one sweet day a pale green tip will peep.
I’ll bring them out into the light and set them in my room —
And silently and secretly they’ll grow and bud and bloom —
The grey old house will waken from its drowsy slumbering,
To find the rooms ablaze with flowers, as if it were the Spring! …

With daffodils and hyacinths, narcissi, tulips too —
A flaring mass of loveliness in gold and pink and blue —
And I shall smile, remembering my small part in the show —
For though we plant and tend the bulbs —
it’s God that makes them grow.

—Patience Strong

Photo by author

Flower beds yield such rewards, and peonies are my favorite flower. When my husband was assigned overseas and I moved near family, my grandmother would bring me a large bouquet of peonies cut from her flower gardens every Saturday morning. The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley authored an essay titled How Flowers Changed the World, published in 1957 (posthumously published as a book), writing that “the appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man.” Flowers bring us joy, sometimes sneezes, and come lush and bold to announce the end of winter. The annuals, the perennials, the rekindled blooms of shrubs and trees, even cacti. The flower is the muse of so much poetry, such as the famous William Wordsworth poem “Daffodils,” also titled I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Here is the splendid closing stanza of Wordsworth’s poem.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

—from William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

On a lighter note and by one who loved to press wildflowers, here is my poem:

The Press of Flowers

I love bluebonnets
pressed between pages
pristine in a heavy book
surprising me—next year
when I search for words—
blooms of metaphors staring back.

And I love brown-eyed susans
flat in a wooden press
waiting waiting waiting
for the screw to turn || relieve
the pressure of time
where I find them all giggly.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

Your Turn

Write about your gardens or your favorite flower. Their fragrance and how open from a bud to bloom and fade to gone. The smell of the soil and spring rains. How you feel when you tend your garden and flower beds. In the words of @codeofthewest, “You don’t stumble into a good life. You tend to it.” Like a garden.

Photo by Judy Dean, Creative Commons license via Flickr. “The Seed-Shop” by Muriel Stuart and “Bulbs” by Patience Strong are in the Public Domain. Post by Sandra Fox Murphy.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Sandra Fox Murphy

Sandra grew up everywhere as a USAF dependent, rootless, and when exposed to the beatnik poets at Indian Valley College, was smitten with poetry. After retirement from the U.S. Geological Survey, she found herself immersed in storytelling, and ensconced in Texas, researches small-town history and is the author of six novels, including Let the Little Birds Sing, the beginning of the Fidelia McCord Trilogy inspired by a young girl who came to Texas in 1847. Aging Without Grace is her first poetry collection, and her poems have been published at the Ocotillo Review, The Write Launch, Humans of the World, The River, and in several anthologies. Sandra's muses are the environment, history, and the natural beauty and mystery of place.

Latest posts by Sandra Fox Murphy (see all)

• Poet Laura: Gardens and Grandpa - May 7, 2025
• Poet Laura: The Beats, National Poetry Month, and Earth Day - April 2, 2025
• Poet Laura: The Consequence of Cats - March 5, 2025