May Sarton: Greedy for Flowers

May 3, 1912

On this day, the poet and diarist May Sarton was born in Belgium, and though her life carried her across continents, her truest home was always in words and gardens. In Nelson, New Hampshire, her small house and beloved plot became the setting for some of her most luminous reflections.

“I am not a greedy person,” she once confessed, “except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.”

It is a sentiment that every gardener recognizes, that restless desire for one more rose, one more peony, one more attempt to coax beauty from the soil.

In her seventies, May mused that “a garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.”

And yet she persisted, striving toward glory despite inevitable disappointments.

She took solace from Vita Sackville-West, who herself kept a pile of failed plant labels at Sissinghurst — proof not of defeat, but of the courage to try.

For May, gardening was prayer as much as pastime.

“Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit,” she wrote, “who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.”

In her words, we hear the gardener’s creed: patience, humility, and grace. Her legacy blooms not only in the pages she wrote but in the quiet encouragement she offers to every hand that takes up a trowel.