How Does Your Garden Grow?

Bleeding Hearts

Every April across America, friends and family roll up their sleeves, pull on leather gloves, pick up rakes and hoes, and celebrate National Garden Month.  It's an opportunity to make our corner of the world a greener, healthier, and more livable place. Today, Poetry on Parade joins the celebration: a peaceful celebration, but... listen!  There's a lot growing on in a garden: 

You Never Hear the Garden Grow 

Grape Hyacinth

Row on Row,

you never hear the garden

grow.

Seeds split.

Roots shove and reach.

Earth heaves.

Leaves unfurl.

Stems pierce the

ground.

Pea pods fatten.

Vines

stretch and curl.

Such growing

going on

without a sound! 

-- Lilian Moore

Our next poem celebrates an unwelcome visitor to many gardens. The dandelion gets its name from the French phrase dent-de-lion, meaning lion's tooth.  Dandelion poet Hilda Conkling (1910-1986) composed most of her poetry before she was ten years old.  Hilda's mother wrote down her young daughter's words and poems.  When Hilda grew older,  her mother no longer transcribed the poems, and not much is known of the Hilda's grown-up work.

 Dandelion

O little soldier with the golden helmet,

What are you guarding on my lawn?

You with your green gun

And your yellow beard,

Why do you stand so stiff?

There is only the grass to fight! 

-- Hilda Conkling

Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, wrote our next garden verse.  The poem takes advantage of poetic repetition: the use and re-use of sounds, syllables, words, and phrases:

Green Grass and Dandelions

Never has the grass been so green

Bright and green and growing

Never have the dandelions been so yellow

Bright yellow

Constellations

Brave little lions

Suns in the grass

Dandelions

In the green green green green grass

Never has the grass been so green

Bright and green and growing.

In any spring. 

-- Margaret Wise Brown

Poetry Paraders who spend time in the garden know that taking good care of plants is good for us, too! Research confirms that gardeners live happier, eat healthier, perform better in school, and feel better about their environment. Our next poem features one  smart gardener with a green thumb (an idiom meaning the ability to make plants grow well) and another green gardener with... a bright idea: 

Two Gardeners

Tara planted tulip bulbs

And black-eyed Susan seed.

Peter planted light bulbs

So all the worms could read. 

-- Douglas Florian

Our final poem of the day leads us down the garden path (an idiom meaning that it tricks or deceives us):

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row. 

We recognize this popular English nursery rhyme: it's about a  stubborn little girl with a green thumb... or is it?  Over the years, scholars have suggested that the rhyme was written about Mary, Queen of Scots or Mary I of England. We can read more about the historical background of familiar nursery rhymes in Over the Candlestick: Classic Nursery Rhymes and the Real Stories Behind Them, collected by Wayne and Michael G. Montgomery.  It's available in the LMC at 398.8.