First up; a poem:
Everything In The Garden Is Lovely by Alasdair Aston
Everything In The Garden Is Lovely by Alasdair Aston
Even the fat slug
That drags its belly nightly
Over dank paving
And into the heart of the lettuce
Is lovely.
And the seething myriads in the ant-hill
Are lovely.
The stealthy, disruptive mole,
The grubbing, wet-nosed hedgehog
Are lovely.
And the millipede,
The centipede,
The sexually reproductive woodlouse
Are lovely.
The dung fly and the dung beetle
Are double lovely.
The burying beetle, the emmet,
The devil’s coach-horse, the dor
Are lovely.
Bean blight, leaf scab, club root,
Rose canker, cuckoo spit, wireworm
Cutworm, carrot fly, codlin,
Woolly aphis, apple weevil,
Leaf curl, algae,
Big bud, brown spot,
Rust, smut and mildew
Are all of them lovely.
And the flowers are lovely, too-
Nightshade, broomrape, henbane,
Love-lies bleeding and dead-men’s fingers,
Viper’s bugloss, red hot poker,
Wormwood, woundwort, rue.
And the gardener himself is lovely-
With one eye on the stable clock
And the other on lovely nothing,
Flat on his back where he fell.
The lovely flies walk in his lovely mouth.
Everything in the garden is lovely.
Alasdair Aston 1975
And secondly, a look at a greenhouse full of curiosities from 1884:
Against Nature (A Rebours), by J.-K. Huysmans
He had done with artificial flowers aping the true; he wanted natural flowers imitating the false...The gardeners unloaded from their vans a collection of Caladiums whose swollen, hairy stalks carried enormous leaves, shaped like a heart; while keeping a general look of kinship, they were every one different.
They included some extraordinary specimens,--some rosy-red, like the Virginale which seemed cut out in glazed cloth, in shiny court-plaster; some all white, like the Albane, that looked as if made of the semi-transparent membrane that lines an ox's ribs, or the diaphanous film of a pig's bladder. Others again, especially the one called Madame Maine, mimicked zinc, parodied pieces of stencilled metal coloured emperor-green, blotched with drops of oil paint, streaks of red-lead and ceruse: these,--the Bosphorus was an example,--gave the illusion of starched calico, spotted with crimson and myrtle-green; those, the Aurora Borealis for instance, had broad leaves the colour of raw meat, intersected by striations of a darker red and purplish threads, leaves that seemed swollen and sweating with dark liquor and blood.
This plant, the Aurora Borealis, and the Albane between them displayed the two opposite poles of constitution, the former bursting with apoplexy, the latter pallid with bloodlessness...
Read the rest of the contents of the ghastly glasshouse here....
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