Blooms and Gloom: The Poetic Landscapes of Charlotte Mary Mew
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
November 15, 1869
On this day, dear readers and fellow gardeners, we celebrate the birth of a most intriguing literary flower: Charlotte Mary Mew, the English poet whose verses bloomed with a haunting beauty that continues to captivate us to this very day.
Born in the year of our Lord 1869, Charlotte Mary Mew cultivated a garden of words that was both exquisite and melancholic. Her poetry, like the most enigmatic of blooms, often carries a fragrance of sorrow intertwined with moments of stark beauty.
Consider, if you will, these lines from her poem In Nunhead Cemetery, where she presents us with a most unsettling perspective on nature's loveliest creation:
There is something horrible about a flower;
This, broken in my hand, is one of those
He threw it in just now; it will not live another hour;
There are thousands more; you do not miss a rose.
Oh, how these words cut to the quick!
To think of a flower as something horrible, to speak so casually of its demise - it's enough to make a gardener's pruning shears tremble. And yet, is there not a kernel of truth in her observation?
Do we not, in our pursuit of the perfect garden, sometimes forget the individual beauty of each bloom?
But let us not dwell too long in the shadow of the cemetery.
Mew's poetic garden offers other vistas, equally thought-provoking.
In The Sunlit House, she paints a picture of a garden neglected, yet not without hope:
The parched garden flowers
Their scarlet petals from the beds unswept
Like children unloved and ill-kept
But I, the stranger, knew that I must stay.
Pace up the weed-grown paths and down
Till one afternoon ...
From an upper window a bird flew out
And I went my way.
Here, my dear gardeners, we find a scene all too familiar to those of us who have inherited an overgrown plot. The comparison of neglected flowers to unloved children tugs at the heartstrings, does it not?
And yet, there's a glimmer of hope in that bird taking flight. Perhaps it's a reminder that even in the most unkempt garden, life finds a way to thrive and, ultimately, to soar.
As we tend to our own gardens, let us remember Charlotte Mary Mew.
Her verses remind us that beauty can be found in the most unexpected places - in a cemetery, in a neglected garden, in the flight of a bird. They encourage us to look beyond the surface, to find meaning in every petal, every leaf, every seemingly empty plot of earth.
So, dear readers, the next time you're deadheading roses or pulling weeds, pause for a moment.
Consider the complexity of each flower, each plant.
For in doing so, you're not just gardening - you're engaging in a poetic act that would surely have brought a smile to Charlotte Mary Mew's face.