Category: Gardening

I check the spade, I oil, I scrape;
I paint tool handles, not to lose them.
Yes, things are all in A-1 shape,
Except, it could be, I, who’ll use them.

by Ray Romine Monday, April 2, 1951

I think a garden is perhaps all right if you just want to
rear a lettuce or a radish,
But folks who carry such things to extremes can be a very sad dish.

You, for instance cannot go within fourteen rods of Mrs.
Penelope Powerses’
Without she will take your hand and haul you out to see her
trellises and bowerses.

She wants you to enthuse over her iris and the.pink-quilled peony;
And if you were to tell her you couldn’t enthuse by just
getting in edgewise one or two words in an evening,
you’d be an unmitigated meony.

At super-cultivetion and soil undeniably friable
She points with perhaps pride justifiable.

That her Poet’s Narcissi are beautiful,
I agree, feeling that, since I came originally of my own
free will, I should be dutiful;

But with such words as Syringa vulgaris, Myosotis scorpioides, Pentstemon barbatus, and H. peruvianum, or Common Heliotrope,
Reliogrope.

She goes into delirious tremblings, rapt in her Belladonna Improved Delphinium,
But I can’t seem to wrap myselphinium;

Interminable lectures on the respective merits of Siberian
And Japanese iris,
Do naught but tiris.

Very interesting, no doubt, this floriculture,
But, for me, with but a minimum of delving, I could find a more fascinating sorticulture;

I’d trade her choicest Darwinian tulips
For an easy-chair, a detective story, and two large mint
Juleps

Propagation, fertilization, germination; pollination (both
self and cross), and irrigation, are quite complex when you come right down to ’em:
And I always thought you planted seeds in the dirt, and
grew ’em;

But no–your blooms will wilt and rust; they’ll blight and
rack and ruin,
Unless you spray, and dust, and mulch and cultivate, and pruin.

As I ponder all this and her lily-white hands, her gardener she off-handedly mentions,
And then I realize all her actual gardening is done by
intent ions.

Donning a terrific hat, a gorgeous basket, gloves, and a
pair of shears,
She meanders forth to garden, and it of surplus blossoms clears.

Which, I think is the sort of gardening which would to me appeal–
Enthusiasm, intentions, and no work that’s real.

Still, thank you, here among daffodil and jonquil
Life would be a little TOO tronquil.

Yes, she can have her trifoliates, her composites, and her
Hybrida grandiflora;
I’m personally getting really hungry, tired and to the
point where I couldn’ t stand a whole lot mora.

So, please, I must be leaving now, it’s getting late, Mrs.
Powers–
She never even hears me and she can ( and does} go on like that for howers.·

I, however, think we should’ be grateful to gardening, and to it thanks send up–
For if all the Mrs. Powers’ in the world turned all this
enfevered passion into something detrimental to society,
where would we all end up?

What? I’m sorry, Mrs. P.
Rude I didn’t mean to be;
Really, now, I beg your pardon– .
Enthralled was I by your lovely garden!

by Ray Romine Sunday, May 9, 1943

Only a poet is wholly free:
Gardens are made by fools like me.

by Ray Romine Saturday, December 15, 1951

Every gardening writer rants
That it’s cozy to have plants
Stuck in corners, on the sill,
Decorating fit to kill.
They grow positively sobby
On the merits of the hobby:
How much friendlier by far
Homes with pots of posies are!
They tell how to cultivate–
Water, feed, and propagate.

So far I get; then, as the flames
Consume the book, this one exclaims:
Indoor Gardening, no dice!
Outdoor blisters quite suffice.

by Ray Romine Saturday, August 4, 1951

Leaves that clutter up the fall
Lay a heavy-handed pall
Upon who, for his own sake,
Has an eye upon the rake.

by Ray Romine Friday, September 14, 1951

When grass is cut, I like it then–
I sniff its fresh new odor, but it
Won’t smell half so pretty when
I’m older and I have to cut it.

by Ray Romine Monday, February 25, 1952

In February, gardens lie
Beneath the winter’s lash,
And lack the colored dash
That draws from casual passers-by
A wondering glance, an envied sigh.

But gardeners are of a kind
Enthusiasms play
Upon so freely they
Take joy from last year’s flowers, and find
Content from next year’s. Love is blind!

by Ray Romine Wednesday, January 30, 1946

I had rather be Thistle,
And King of my field
Than Rose in the garden,
And ever cry “Yield!”

by Ray Romine Thursday, October 17, 1946

Usually, come each September,
I dread old Jackie Frost’s approach.
As warm days spurn us, we stoke the furnace–
To just the door may he encroach.

He makes me wear my gloves and ear-muffs,
And store away my bathing suit;
He over-powers my choicest flowers
In the hey-day of their yout’.

All the pumpkins and the melons
Give up at his frigid step.
Just the squirrels (boys and girrels)
Seem infected with his pep.

Our summer, though, has been so ghoulish
My garden isn’t quite the same;
For such a zany, wet and rainy,
I can hardly take the blame.

So THIS year, Jack, you’re welcome, really,
I’ll trade my linens for my tweeds–
You I’ll pardon in the garden–
Hurry, boy, and KILL THOSE WEEDS!

by Ray Romine Thursday, September 16, 1943

Freshly-cut grass–that smell–I love it;
Except when I am a-mowing of it!

by Ray Romine Thursday, July 22, 1943