Friday Flowers: Tulips and Turtles

Yellow and orange tulips

The Turtle
(By Ogden Nash)

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.

Pink tulips

It's been a rough couple of days, but I figured that we could have a bit of levity to round out the week, setting a positive mood for the weekend. And what makes for a smile and chuckle better than a pretty bouquet of tulips and the verse of Ogden Nash?

Moreover, how often do you see tulips and turtles thematically paired? ;-)

Friday Flowers: Tulipomania

Purple tulips to commemorate Tulipomania (1637)

Colored Hats
(By Gertrude Stein)

Colored hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank spaces, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs, the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a little flower and a big delay a big delay that makes more nurses than little women really little women. So clean is a light that nearly all of it shows pearls and little ways. A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole.


I adore Gertrude Stein and her amazing skill at crafting sound, combining words in such a manner as to create new meaning and significance through cadence and imagery and juxtaposition, going on and going on, with repetition and resonance rolling the words off the tongue, through the mind, almost hypnotic, entrancing, in their flow. ;-)

Purple tulips in a glass vase

And what of the tulips? Well, I was going to put up another camellia post, but I realized that today marks the collapse of the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s. I couldn' pass up on that.

First Friday Flowers of Summer

White Tulips

 White Flowers

(By Mary Oliver)

Last night
in the fields
I lay down in the darkness
to think about death,
but instead I fell asleep,
as if in a vast and sloping room
filled with those white flowers
that open all summer,
sticky and untidy,
in the warm fields.
When I woke
the morning light was just slipping
in front of the stars,
and I was covered
with blossoms.
I don’t know
how it happened ---
I don’t know
if my body went diving down
under the sugary vines
in some sleep-sharpened affinity
with the depths, or whether
that green energy
rose like a wave
and curled over me, claiming me
in its husky arms.
I pushed them away, but I didn’t rise.
Never in my life had I felt so plush,
or so slippery.
or so resplendently empty.
Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began.

Well, that brings us to the end of another week. I've been going at a slower pace recently. The upcoming two weeks will likely be much slower, especially during the July 4th weekend. Hopefully, the posts are of good enough quality to make up for the reduction in quantity. I plan to pick up production again sometime in mid-July.