An experiment of apparition and whim.

A good great ghost of a garden!

—V.

My Dear Love,

How to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology? No quaint, no dainty, no winsome. This smells good, that smells bad, my hands rank with manure. This at least is pure.

—V.

Oh Darling,

Midges and tetchiness.

A constantly muddy mood.

In my impatience for mail it strikes me that the perianth is a floral envelope—a cloak concealing the reproductive organs …

Alas, I forbear. A capacity for waiting defines both the gardener and the letter-writer (the growing season longer than my endurance). I throw myself into work and diversion but progress so slowly I fear there will be frost by the time this reaches you. Snow on your salpiglossis.

—H.

O’ My Love,

Busy Lizzie. Wink and blink. Touch-me-not. Impatiens as ever a virtue my dear! Enough of this love your perennials and they will love you back threefold and several seasons. If you don’t like it, pull it out! My sweetbriars are scraggy at the roots and anemically unremarkable—my backstairs darlings. I have enfeebled them with too much devotion.

—V.

My My My,

The wide sweep of today.

Books, flowers, and poetry. Woolgathering and trees.

The wood garden is fervor, a blaze of primula and anemone.

The poplar is passion, viola-resonant, my vibrating footfall.

Not a weed in sight, lupines and irises, perfect turf.

The Hugh Dickson under the bedroom window

—my classic hybrid tea, my repeat rose—

buds patience and patience.

—V.

My Own Own Darling,

Pegging perpetual roses.

Bourbon roses.

Hybrid perpetuals.

Cut-and-come-again.

Cut-and-come-again.

Rose shoots

tied at intervals.

Rose shoots

twined in a half-hoop.

The wall plants,

the post-and-wired.

My dear,

ask only for a generous floraison:

the deliberate flowers,

the thoughtful,

the single-bloomed,

the fully double.

You can’t ask everything of a plant.

—V.

My Dear Love,

Each day the light diminishes earlier. Colors at dusk are softer with an opulence they lack under full sun. My eyes strain with the beautiful painful squint. My wax flowers, my painter’s palette—a floral encaustic! The papery papavers are waxy in the frigid morning air, but by noon I can see my fingers through them, fluttering, a swim of color, red under red.

“The poppy in her radiance is translucent,” wrote Lawrence. Not the unalloyed red of the Adonis-blood anemone, but Vonnoh’s fiery cadmium, blood with a drop of sulfide. What was his painting? … Les coquelicots—Entre une plaquemine et une orange sanguine. Somewhere between persimmon and blood orange. Une goutte de couleur.

My heart flowers, drop by drop …

Out the window my love lies bleeding.

—V.

Dearest,

Some thoughts on shade.

I screen my eyes against sun a shade of canary bird zinnia.

Yellow is remembrance, the scent of an absent friend.

Red is steadfastness, the heart, a hummingbird chasing nectar.

On the north side of the house rhododendrons,

the shade-loving azaleas, a splendid contradiction

of charming and lethal—mad honey—

the thinking-of-home-bush, the affections held back.

—H.