A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)
Reprinted, by permission, in the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005)*
“The Gardener”
The gardener does not love to talk,
He makes me keep the gravel walk;
And when he puts his tools away,
He locks the door and takes the key.
Away behind the currant row
Where no one else but cook may go,
Far in the plots, I see him dig,
Old and serious, brown and big.
He digs the flowers, green, red and blue,
Nor wishes to be spoken to.
He digs the flowers and cuts the hay,
And never seems to want to play.
Silly gardener! Summer goes,
And winter comes with pinching toes,
When in the garden bare and brown
You must lay your barrow down.
Well now, and while the summer stays
To profit by these garden days,
O how much wiser you would be
To play at Indian wars with me!
The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature. Eds. Jack Zipes, Gillian Avery, Peter Hunt, Lissa Paul
and Lynne Vallone. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. 2471 pages.
*
Come on Into My Tropical Garden by Grace Nichols (1988)
Reprinted, by permission, in the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005)
“Come on Into My Tropical Garden”
Come on into my tropical garden
Come on in and have a laugh in
Taste my sugar cake and my pine drink
Come on in please come on in
And yes you can stand up in my hammock
and breeze out in my trees
you can pick my hibiscus
and kiss my chimpanzees
O you can roll up in the grass
And if you pick up a flea
I’ll take you for a quick dip-wash
in the sea
believe me there’s nothing better
for getting rid of a flea
than having a quick dip-wash in the sea
Come on into my tropical garden
Come on in please come on in.
Carver: A Life in Poems by Marilyn Nelson (2001)
Selections printed, by permission, in the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature
(2005)
“The Wild Garden”
c. 1916
Genesis 1:29†
The flowers of Cercis canadensis,‡
ovate Phytolacca decandra leaves,
the serrate leaves of Taraxacum officinale,
Viola species and Trifolium pratens flowers
a handful of tulip petals,
a small chopped onion, a splash of vinegar,
a little salt and pepper and oil, and voilà!
Would you like a second helping?
The Creator makes nothing
for which there is no use.
There are choice wild vegetables
which make fine foods.
Lepidium species, a common dooryard pest,
can be cooked up as greens.
Cirsium vulgare stems,
harvested with gloves and scissors
in a roadside ditch
and stripped of thorns,
can be steamed, drizzled,
and pulled through the teeth
so the delicious heart
oozes to the tongue.
Mmmmmmm . . .Oh, excuse me.
If all crops perished, the race could survive
on a balanced diet of wild vegetables.
The homeliest, lowest,
torn out by the roots, poisoned;
the “inferior,” the “weeds”—
They grow despite our will to kill them,
despite our ignorance
of what their use might be.
We refuse to thank them,
†
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth,
and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
‡
The NACL annotates the Latin names of common plants. In order, they are Eastern redbud, pokeweed,
dandelion, red clover, cress, bull thistle, daylily, and cinquefoil.
“The Wild Garden” cont.
but they keep on coming back
with the Creator’s handwritten invitation.
Another Hemerocallis fritter?
Try some of this Potentilla tea.