This Poetry Pairing, our last for the 2014-15 school year, features Amy Lowell’s poem “The Garden by Moonlight” and the article “Plants With Roots Attached” by Michael Tortorello.
To view all the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.
Finally, here are two activity sheets you can use with any edition of this feature:
Poem
Amy Lowell was in her 30s when her first poetry collection was published in 1912. During a career that spanned just over a dozen years, she wrote and published over 650 poems, yet scholars cite Lowell’s efforts to awaken American readers to contemporary trends in poetry as her more influential contribution to literary history. Lowell posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926 for her collection “What’s O’Clock,” edited by Ada Dwyer Russell.
‘The Garden by Moonlight’
By Amy Lowell
A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with
perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and
trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the
chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the
fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.
Times Selection Excerpt
In the In the Garden column “Plants With Roots Attached,” Michael Tortorello writes about Allen Bush and his gardens full of perennial flowers, which, unlike annuals, return with new plants year after year:
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It is through Allen Bush, the seedsman and raconteur, that I lay claim to the 400-year-old legacy of the Dutch engraver and floriculturist Emanuel Sweert. On a cloudless Saturday morning not long ago, Mr. Bush rummaged in his backyard and cut me a clump of a purplish iris. It was an ordinary looking plant, not yet in bloom — hardly noticeable in his oversize city lot.
“It’s very small compared to the German bearded irises,” said Mr. Bush, 63. “You’ll look at it and say, really? But it’s got a charm because it’s so old. And because of Ellen.”
That would be Ellen Hornig, the proprietor of Seneca Hill Perennials, in Oswego, N.Y. The nursery is gone now: she closed it to care for her ailing husband. But 20 years ago, Mr. Bush ordered the cultivar called Iris Swertii from Ms. Hornig. “She had a story about where she got all this stuff,” Mr. Bush said.
This description was high praise. Though Mr. Bush is a gardener of unusual knowledge and influence, he is, first, a cultivator of stories and relationships.
Over his long career in horticulture, he has gone herb shopping in the Smoky Mountains with the legendary British gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd. He has been received at the Bavarian garden of Countess Helen von Stein-Zeppelin. (“Her uncle was the Zeppelin of dirigible fame,” Mr. Bush said.) And Mr. Bush has wandered 10 countries and three continents on collecting trips with the grass king Kurt Bluemel.
Never heard of Kurt Bluemel, who died last month at 81? Here’s a yarn: Mr. Bluemel sourced four million savanna plants for the safari ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida. As Mr. Bush tells it, the ride designers failed to anticipate that wildebeest would graze.
You could see Mr. Bluemel’s little bluestem mix on a two-acre hillside at Mr. Bush’s country house near Salvisa, Ky., an hour east of Louisville. “He sent us a box of at least 100 pounds, which we scattered — kind of the meadow-in-a-can approach,” Mr. Bush said.
… Along the stone stairs lie a couple of small concrete planters. Mr. Bush stopped here to point at a daisylike flower, Erigeron compositus. “This little thing is a fleabane,” he said. “I got this from Harlan Hamernik, a legendary nurseryman in Nebraska. His motto was, ‘If they’ll grow in Nebraska, they’ll grow anywhere.’ ”
Mr. Bush continued: “He died two years ago, lighting his furnace, and the house blew up. It was really sad.” And yet the fleabane remains behind. “Now I pass by and see it,” Mr. Bush said, “and I think of Harlan.”
“The Garden by Moonlight” is the subject of a Poetry Foundation poem guide.
To view all the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.