For the next spring.

The virtue of being an untidy gardener is that most of my flowers get to set seed. The down side is a shabby September garden!

So this year I decided to share seeds with friends at work. I filled seven bowls with seeds collected from the garden and the drive. All of them are seeds I know will germinate and make good plants and it was a great pleasure to feel their various textures between my fingers and have friends turn them over and ask questions about the colours and perfumes of the plants they will make.

 

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.

The Seed-shop
By Muriel Stuart

HERE in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone and shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry—
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

Dead that shall quicken at the voice of spring,
Sleepers to wake beneath June’s tempest kiss;
Though birds pass over, unremembering,
And no bee find here roses that were his.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That shall drink deeply at a century’s streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can stir a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

 

I collected masses of wild marjoram, a heaped bowl of tiny yarrow, a pinch of pale wall flower seeds, a spiked ball of wild agrimony, a sliver of shining columbine seeds, a roll of tough everlasting pea seeds and a sliding flurry of flat honesty seeds.

I hope they have all gone to good homes and will flourish in new gardens.