Countdown to Spring: Day 3

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Last week I posted about my mom’s green thumb.  Today, with only a few winter days remaining, her blooms are reaching their slender necks for the sun and smiling!

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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.  ~Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

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With daffodils mad footnotes for the spring,
And asters purple asterisks for autumn –
~Conrad Aiken, Preludes for Memnon, 1930

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I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.  ~Ruth Stout

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God loved the flowers and invented soil.  Man loved the flowers and invented vases.  ~Variation of a saying by Jacques Deval (God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.)

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The front door to springtime is a photographer’s best friend. ~Terri Guillemets

Countdown to Spring: Days 4 and 5

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In honor of the amazing weekend weather and celebration of Saint Patrick’s day I’m posting one of my very favorite green blooms.  Though they are not four leafed clovers (which are also poking their heads up everywhere), I think Saint Patrick would have loved their heart shaped leaves!

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“When all thoughts
Are exhausted
I slip into the woods
And gather
A pile of shepherd’s purse.

Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.”

~Ryokan

 

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Countdown to Spring: 6 Days

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Today’s photograph is of the flower I think my mom my loves best… Although, to a flower lover this may be sort of like saying you have a favorite child.  There is a green thumb gene somewhere is her Lapp family heritage that she and her sister have carried on from my Grandpa but just never really took hold of me.  I guess I photograph the blooms instead of plant them!Countdown 6

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Iris

Countdown to Spring: 7 Days

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Abundance!  With only one week to go until the official start of Spring, there are new little  blooms everywhere.  Today’s photographs are from a quick stop at my midwifery teacher’s home yesterday and taken with my iPhone.

Countdown 7 Daffodil 1

How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!  ~Colette

Countdown 7 Daffodil 2

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.  ~John Ruskin

Countdown 7 Lilac

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling, and breathe forth their sweetest odours. Flow forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond these mountains the dear one of my dreams! ~Heinrich Heine, “The Hartz Journey” (1824), Pictures of Travel, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, 1855

Countdown 7 poppy

Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
~Francis Thompson, “The Poppy,” 1891

Can you find the tiny little spider friend in this photo???
Can you find the tiny little spider friend in this photo???

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair…  ~Susan Polis Shut

Countdown to Spring: 8 Days

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Countdown to Spring 8 days

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.  ~Ruth Stout

Countdown to Spring: 9 Days

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Countdown to Spring 9

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

Countdown to Spring: 10 Days

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Countdown to Spring 10

It’s spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!  ~Mark Twain

Countdown to Spring: 11 Days

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Countdown 11

The flower is the poetry of reproduction.  It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.  ~Jean Giraudoux

Countdown to Spring: 12 Days

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Countdown day 12

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.  When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. ~ Thich Nhat Hahn

Countdown to Spring: 13 Days

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Countdown to Spring 13/1

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words.  They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.  ~Lydia M. Child

Countdown to Spring 13/2

A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.  ~The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams