...has faded away

Two days ago, wonderful vibrant lovely flowers on another site prompted me to share Kipling's The Glory of the Garden. Of course, if the garden is not maintained, the glory fades away (sick transit Gloria Monday, as the reporter telegraphed when Ms Swanson had a bad Atlantic crossing early in the week).  Every gardener knows that fear, and while there can be beauty in autumn, there is none in desolation and the loss of love:

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

Now lie dead. That metrical masterpiece is Swinburne's, from A Forsaken Garden.

Comments

[Peter the flautist]

As a keen gardener who has lost a lot of plants over the years to neglect (mine) I emotionally agree entirely with Swinburne. However the way our native plants can colonise (sadly some adventive aliens are better) our negelected gardens is surely not all loss? The wealth of native species to be seen in London alongside our commuter tracks gives me great pleasure as I travel daily to work.