In My Grandparents’ Garden

Love in a mist

made me pause in perplexity
at the blueness of its petals
and its name, Nigella— who was she
to give her name to such beauty?
I delighted in the saucer-shaped flowers
a ruff of feathery foliage round their throats,
which became pretty seeds to collect
in a used vellum airmail envelope,
ready to plant next year.

Peony

pink peony
opened to the touch of sun
bashful geisha’s lips

I gathered petals
silky frills of deep cerise
my secret friends

fading on dry soil
haven of childhood summers
my watering can

Honesty

In springtime, I would marvel for hours
at a crowd of white and purple flowers.

Eventually the pretty petals perished,
turned into brown oval parcels, relinquished

to the wind that peeled off their wrapping
and revealed a crowd of honest gleaming

moons, translucent, papery, nearly white
Judas coins with an eerie silver light.

At Christmas time, they would return
inside, cut and dried in a cut-glass urn

while outside, at the end of the garden,
they became rattling winter skeletons.

 Night-scented stock

I remember evenings
at the scullery door inhaling
the lasting beauty
of those loose sprays
of white flowers, stars bursting
among ghostly, grey-
green leaves.

Kim M. Russell, 19^th April 2026

On the nineteenth day of April, the optional NaPoWriMo prompt is a flowery one, inspired by the word florilegium, a book of botanical illustrations of decorative plants and also a collection of excerpts from other writings.  “In her poem, ‘Florilegium’, Canadian poet Sylvia Legris gathers together many five-lined stanzas that describe flowers but also play with the sounds of their names, their medical (or poisonous) qualities, and historical aspects of herbalism.”

Our challenge is to pick a flower or two from the online edition of Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers and write poems in which we muse on our selections’ names.