Friday, April 17, 2020

Poppies

For Virginia Woolf, the garden in To The Lighthouse becomes again a signifier for time passing, but in an utterly different way. The Hebridean garden of the Ramsay family - their second home, as we would call it today - is revisited by the children who holidayed there, now adults, and is made to speak for the passage of time: "Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes towered among the roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages. . ." 


Satiny poppies of all tints danced in the breeze by the score, gaily defying flowers which had lived in the garden for years and which it might be confessed seemed rather to wonder how such new people had got there.--The Secret Garden

The Tansy Patch was east of the Disappointed House, between the Blair Water and the sand-dunes. Most people considered it a bare, lonely, neglected place, but Emily thought it was fascinating. The little clap-boarded house topped a small hill, over which tansy grew in a hard, flaunting, aromatic luxuriance, rising steeply and abruptly from a main road. A straggling rail fence, almost smothered in wild rosebushes, bounded the domain, and a sagging, ill-used little gate gave ingress from the road. Stones were let into the side of the hill for steps up to the front door. Behind the house was a tumble-down little barn, and a field of flowering buckwheat, creamy green, sloping down to the Blair Water. In front was a crazy veranda around which a brilliant band of red poppies held up their enchanted cups. --Emily of New Moon

No comments:

Post a Comment

ROSES I Want

Sweet Briar Rose  Known as the "Sweet Briar Rose" because of the strongly apple-scented leaves, this is a favorite English na...