My Photo Journal: As Maples Bloom

The maple trees are in full flower in Toronto, lighting up the surroundings with their sunny blooms. Individually, these flowers are small, barely even covering the palm of my 3 year-old daughter's hand. Collectively, they shroud each maple tree in a cloud of golden yellow and can be extremely striking from a distance. These flowers mature into maple "keys" which soar easily when the winds blow them helter-skelter, and are great fun for kids as they fling these "helicopters" and watch them spin through the air. Probably not as much fun for an ardent gardener as these keys take root very easily wherever they land!

I really liked the Rainer Maria Rilke quote that I used in the second picture, and tried to find the poem where it was supposed to have been taken. After scouring the Internet, I discovered that he never actually wrote those exact lines! The closest version I could find was a translation by Robert Temple of the following stanza from "The Sonnets to Orpheus":
Spring has come again.
The Earth is like a child that has learned to recite a poem;
No, - many, many.
And for the difficulty
Of learning them now, the prize is bestowed.
It was quite disconcerting, in a way, and I wondered if I should use the more accurate translation. In the end, I decided to leave the quote as-is since it appears quite frequently in popular quotation databases, and I felt that the sentiment suited the image nicely! Let's just chalk it up to poetic licence! :)

© 2019 FieldandGarden.com. All rights reserved. (Originally published 2012.)

My Photo Journal: Renewal

Image © FieldandGarden.com. All rights reserved.

RENEWAL
by Dora Read Goodale
(first published 1887)

There's magic in the air today,
There's promise in the sun;
The very brooks begin to play,
And frolic as they run.

The hive is all astir with bees,
The slender willows shine;
The sap is mounting in the trees,
And swelling in the vine.

The swallow comes from far away
To seek her summer nest,
Whose narrow hanging walls of clay
Await the welcome guest.

At ease upon the cottage floor,
His head between his feet,
The shaggy setter guards the door,
Or dozes in the heat;

And there beneath the fitful ray
Of many a yellow beam,
His aged master, bent and gray,
Is laughing through his dream.

O, pleasure pricks in every vein,
And grief is turned to joy,
For Earth herself is young again,
And Time is but a boy!

Public domain poem is fom my personal collection. All digitized poems by FieldandGarden.com are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please credit and link back to FieldandGarden.com as your source if sharing or publishing.

My Photo Journal: Aster and Bee

Aster and Bee
© FieldandGarden.com. All rights reserved.
Do you miss the balmy days of summer? As I sit in a chilly room on a darkening day in the midst of a gloomy Canadian winter, I long for the hours I spent tramping about in the fields and meadows with my family when the sun shone hot and insects droned incessantly.

Among the daisies all astir
Observe the belted rover,
The merry little mariner
That sails the seas of clover.

Whene'er a shower falls, pellmell
Upon the seas of clover
He flies into some flower-bell,
And waits until it's over.
("The Bee" by R.K.M., published in 1888)
What do you miss the most from when the weather was sultry? As the snow clings to these January days, let's shake our boots and march through our memories of clover seas and mariner bees and dream of the days when we will arrive at the shores of summer once more.


Public domain poem is fom my personal collection. All digitized poems by FieldandGarden.com are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please credit and link back to FieldandGarden.com as your source if sharing or publishing.

My Photo Journal: Winter Tree

WINTER TREE
by M.K. Powell

Alone, ignored,
The leaves, they went away in fall;
The tree is frozen,
Yet standing tall.

The winter tree
It's sleeping now;
But in spring, it will stir once more,
Wakened by the sun's warming glow.

Right now through the harsh winds of winter,
When animals retreat to their nests,
The tree stands lonely,
While the critters rest.

The scraggly branches
Reach up to the sky.
Remembering the summer days,
When life was peachy as pie.

Winter tree is dark against the sky,
But it stands tall and doesn't bend.
For in the spring,
the weather all will mend.

Poem and photo © 2018 FieldandGarden.com. All rights reserved.