Words in the Garden - Langley's Daffodils, Poetry Posts, and Portland's Leading Edge

Springtime is bursting out in Langley this month, for civic minded citizens planted hundreds and hundreds of daffodils all around the little town last fall. But they didn't leave it at that. Langley being the creative, imaginative and generous place that it is, they added poetry to the patches of daffodils, so visitors and residents get both glorious flowers and their poetry fix in one.

Each patch of daffs has its own weatherproofed poem...

And it doesn't hurt that the backdrop is mountains, sea, and on this morning the Clipper, bringing a boatload from Victoria to join "In Cold Mud", Langley's Murder Mystery Weekend..they were met at landing with the Coroner's Report as well as poetry and just-budding up narcissus...

Which brings me to a contest I'd like to ignite with our sister city of Portland - which is way out ahead of us on bringing words into the garden...Portland neighborhoods sport Poetry Posts where gardeners display their favorite poems for passersby and garden visitors, as well as themselves, to enjoy.

Just like picnic food tastes better in the open air than if you ate the same sandwich indoors, poetry rings more expansively, maybe even closer to the heart, when read in the garden....there's such affinity between words and plants, between the love of poetry and of nature....

I've written more about Portlander Doug Trotter and his Poetry Posts in an upcoming "Plant Life" column in Pacific Northwest magazine - check out his work here. My dear friends Lucy Hardiman and Nancy Goldman gave me one of Doug's copper-topped Poetry Posts when I was in Portland a couple of weeks ago - and it's now up on a trellis in my garden. Close to the back gate, it holds a poem warning how easy it is to miss springtime altogether...

In summer, a 'Roguchi' clematis with tiny purple bells covers the trellis, and I look forward to cutting a window through flower and foliage to frame the Poetry Post....

Can't you picture Poetry Posts out by sidewalks, down lanes and byways, at gates and next to mailboxes? Let's step up and not let Portland out-poem us...

Thanks to Timothy Coleman of Good Nature Publishing for introducing me to this slim poem by A. R. Ammons....I plan to pull out my favorite childhood poetry book Silver Pennies for future inspiration...

 

 

Comments

[Karen]

What a lovely place to be, in a town with thousands of daffodils blessed with poetry! I hope to see your beautiful Clematis on the poetry post when it blooms! xx