Gardening In The Early Morning Poem by Gayathri Seetharam

Gardening in the early morning
-Gayathri B. Seetharam
Virginia Woolf wrote about her heroine, Minnie,
Whose passion was roses
And I decided that I must make my garden into a mini Royal Botanical Gardens
So armed with a spade and a rake that my husband had bought,
I went into the garden
But lo and behold! The tiger lilies had bloomed
As had the irises turned into a violet from the dark blue
That they were some years ago,
When I picked them last month;

It tore at my heart, the thought that I should
Adhere to my plan and dig all of these up
Except for the lily of the valleys
And plant Dutch irises and harlequins and other beautiful flowering perennial bulbs this fall
But a spade is a spade and rakes are rakish
And in plain speaking terms, the dashing and debonair males around
Not to mention the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau,
Have a flowery manner of speaking;

I researched and saw that Lewis Carroll had his character, Alice in Wonderland,
Enact this piece of dialogue:
'O Tiger-lily, ' said Alice... 'I wish you could talk! ' 'We can talk, ' said the Tiger-lily: 'when there's anybody worth talking to."
Haughty is the tiger-lily but passionate in its quest
To conquer the world;

Margaret Atwood, in her book, A Handmaid's Tale,
Has said of the iris:
"Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently."

Jiddu Krishnamurthi has said and I shall use his quote to
Endear the tiny lily-of-the-valleys to your heart,
Beautiful in scent and reminding one of tiny bells,
"A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is"

Hence, all I did was to remove weeds and
Decided to plant bulbs in the gaps
And then if the garden has a heart and soul,
It would develop verse, verve and vivacity.


Acknowledgements:
1. Oxford English Dictionary