Verses from the Orchard: The Garden Poetry of James Edwin Campbell
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
September 28, 1867
On this resplendent autumn day, we turn our thoughts to a master of horticultural verse, James Edwin Campbell who was born on this day.
Campbell's poetic eye captured the ephemeral beauty of fruit trees in bloom with an exquisite sensitivity that every gardener will recognize.
How delightfully he challenges Lowell's famous line in his poem A Night in June, suggesting something even more enchanting:
"What so rare as a day in June?"
O poet, hast thou never known
A night in rose-voluptuous June?
But it is in When The Fruit Trees Bloom that Campbell truly speaks to those of us who tend our orchards with devoted hearts. His verses paint a spring scene that any fruit gardener will recognize with a quickening pulse:
When the fruit trees bloom,
Pink of peach and white of plum,
And the pear-trees' cones of snow
In the old back orchard blow --
Planted fifty years ago!
What gardener has not stood in silent wonder before such a spectacle?
Notice how masterfully he captures the distinctive blooms of each species - the blushing peach, the snow-white plum, the conical flourishes of pear blossom!
His verses continue with a gardener's understanding of the promise held within each flower:
And the cherries' long white row
Gives the sweetest prophecy
Of the banquet that will be,
When the suns and winds of June
Shall have kissed to fruit the bloom --
Then Falstaffian bumble-bees
Drain the blossoms to the lees.
When the fruit trees bloom.
In these lines, Campbell reveals himself as more than merely a poet - he is a keen observer of the orchard's seasonal transformations, from the first tentative buds to the industrious labor of those "Falstaffian bumble-bees," whose work ensures the autumn harvest we now enjoy.