The Earl and the Bee: Lord Chesterfield’s Garden Poetry

September 22, 1694

My dearest garden enthusiasts, on this day we celebrate the birth of Philip Dormer Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, whose connection to our world of gardens comes through a most charming piece of verse about that most essential of garden creatures - the honey bee.

While history remembers Lord Chesterfield primarily for his letters of advice to his son and his wit in corresponding with the luminaries of his day, we gardeners might find particular resonance in one of his timeless admonitions:

I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for hours will take care of themselves...

How well we understand this sentiment as we tend our gardens! Is it not in those stolen minutes of deadheading, those brief moments of weeding, those quick inspections of new growth that our gardens truly flourish?

But it is his delightful poem, preserved in Yale University's collection, that brings us closest to our garden world.

On a Lady Stung By a Bee captures both the sweet and sharp nature of our industrious garden companions:

To heal a wound a bee had made
Upon my Chloe's face,
It's honey to the part she laid,
And bade me kiss the place.

Pleased, I obeyed, and from the wound
Suck'd both the sweet and smart;
The honey on my lips I found,
The sting within my heart.

What gardener hasn't experienced this duality of the bee - both pollinator and protector, bringing us both the sweetness of honey and the sharp reminder of nature's boundaries?

In these few lines, Lord Chesterfield captures perfectly the bittersweet relationship we gardeners share with our striped friends: we cannot have the honey without risking the sting, cannot have the abundant harvest without accepting the occasional sharp reminder of our place in nature's hierarchy.