Splendid is the Flower…

One person’s garden sanctuary, with an abundance of soothing green foliage and few showy flowers, is another’s snooze fest. A border of native wildflowers, carefully selected to support birds, bees and butterflies, is meticulous to some but a “jungle” to others. Some delight in the dried seed heads of last season’s flowering perennials, standing up against the winter snow, and others think it’s a sloppy mess.

Learn what you love, and follow your vision, regardless of what others think of your garden, the clothes you wear or the color you paint your walls. Judge not based on taste, but on sustainability, responsibility, and respect for all life, both human and beyond human.

From Alfred Tennyson:

Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went
Thro’ my garden-bower,
And muttering discontent
Cur’d me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall
It wore a crown of light,
But thieves from o’er the wall
Stole the seed by night.

Sow’d it far and wide
By every town and tower,
Till all the people cried,
“Splendid is the flower.”

Read my little fable:
He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.

With gratitude to my husband for reminding me of these tender verses.