By Marie-Louise Meyers

Spring is the orchestrator of our newly launched mood, a vibrant fantasia

in the meadow and woods with splashes and dashes that soon connect,  purple crocuses in your flowerbeds and and daffodils overcome with pride racing to decorate lawns and running rapids to settle down on a creek bed after a ride of their lives.  You hardly know where they will  “pop up” next while golden goblets mirror the beauty and opulence of spring.

Every inch of soil at Longwood is dedicated to spring’s flower-essence.

Find daffodils in profusion, columbine and poppies added on the Flower Garden Walk, disarming and charming as each has a different color variation to wonder about their origin, but a testimony to the profoundness of Nature’s alluring and newly launched beauty.  Enter the East Conservatory to find the Snow Globe of Winter replaced by a free-flowing fountain surrounded by an auspicious display of hybrid Cineraria. 

Heedless of wind and weather in the hallowed Conservatory, you will witness Spring’s re-enactment all over the world ringing out in Blue Poppies, vivid and dynamic reigning supreme as if a dream world come to life; even variations with poppy-flowered anemones while baskets of hyacinth arrangements abound hanging from the ceiling.   

No accolades needed when perfume abounds.  What touches off the signal even in dark stretches of wood, blood root bows to the ever-lightening mood with the earth warming; step carefully for tiny orchises of every ilk from subdued white and yellow to the deepest purple hue as well as vivid blue colorations. Ever greening are the dramatic trees we believe in ever enlightening with their profound roots subject to the care induced. 

We want Nature to keep performing its magic giving us the centerfold we adore to explore, so let’s keep the door forever open, reduce our use of pesticides and herbicides keeping its allure, its  profound secret alive as Nature continues to give its ever-brightening and uplifting aspect as long as it receives nourishment and care and is not under attack.  

All the shadowy forms reborn green in spring

winds rifling within a hair’s breath of winter,

but never sink in, the sun won’t let it

with its morning chores,

awakening the earth 

with blankets of daffodils

sending chills

through our bodies and minds

with unimaginable goblets of gold to behold

reviving wood duck, their stutter steps,

their landing site, the pond,

the geese from beyond who try to land

when a fake alligator staked out

takes them by surprise.  

No longer do we hear just cheater cheater vibes,

Carolina Wren, but see a Baltimore Oriole’s winged flight 

surprised by a blue bird who tranquilizes

while we spin circlets of daisies around our neck

like a conquest over the winter mood.

Fresh air to breathe even at the contagion hospital

like Bonnie Burns for TB 

where once they lined up on cots on an open porch

with coverlets of down by choice.  

So much suffrage that goes through an artist’s brush,

but it can be reduced to a sublime touch in spring.

One Day You Take on Spring! 

It’s as though one day you’re walking through the Valley of Death

entering a ferocious wind tunnel until you reach the other side

where Someone has taken a dust rag and spruced up the fields

and stained an effervescent spray over the landscape,

and dotted the trees until they could bear no more impetus to green,

the recumbent mystery given both testament and strategy 

with the sun showering blessings, and the rain promising growth.

Sometime it comes in waves as if only the top is persuaded 

sometimes it takes root in the song bird’s wavering route.

There are streaks of gold to behold, daffodils manifold.

mauve and purple firing from atop a prominence.

You hesitate to break the intricately woven seal over the hung-over garden, an ordeal that surrounds you while your head is already thrumming with ideas which keep coming until your hands generate reborn activity

to impress seeds in the freshly dug and composted earth. 

Inhibitions removed over winter’s frozen solitude with seeds placed

strategically in picture perfect rows while you hold them close to your vest while the sun and rain broadcast their refrain throughout your garden 

of ideas waiting patiently to germinate until fruition occurs.

Undeterred by negative thought waves that come over you, as if 

embroiled with the soil, finding comfort in your connection instead.

A moment of communion as if sky and earth in a perfect union of rebirth.

At first unknowable, nothing truly distinguishable in the clutches of Nature,

neither shape nor size, an unfathomable mystery we must abide  

until it takes a form everyone can decipher and understand as if reborn.  

It is contagious even in the haze of the day, even those who can’t employ

hands because of heart stopping beats, sit back and watch as my husband

once did taking on the whole of my daughter’s consummate soul,

while i meander and flounder with words with so little control.  

Spring is captured in a colorful brush 

effectively erasing Winter’s leavings

touching meadows and lawns,

thought-provoking messages reborn.

Starved for the thrilling and trilling of bird song.

A nudge to wildlife when animals reappear 

from darkened holes into passageways

of pulsing light.

How the creek genuflects in the awakening sun

dropping waves of colorful daffodils on the run.

Spring’s flower-essence all over the ground,

best if naturally ordained or given a humous boost,

not strained or chained with herbicides or pesticides.

How the creek genuflects in the awakening un,

dropping waves of daffodils on the run.

In the mood?