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.ยท
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
