Daily Doodle # 29: Mixed Spring Bouquet

Spring bouquet

Daily Doodle # 8: Daffo-doodles

It’s daffodil season!

Daffo-doodles

Watercolor painting of daffodils

Robin with daffodils

Daffodils

Daffodils, 52 Wreaths Project

 

 

A Host of Golden Daffodils

Watercolor sketch of daffodils

Daffodil Wreath (52 Wreaths Project)

You can listen to actress Noma Dumezeni read Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” poem on the BBC at this link.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Daffodil: King Trumpeter

Spring bouquet

“King Trumpeter to Flora Queen,
Hey, ho, daffodil!
Blow, and the golden jousts begin.”
— from “Daffodil,” The Wind in the Trees: A Book of Country Verse, by Katharine Tynan

Watercolor sketch of daffodil

 

Goodbye Daffodils. Hello Tulips.

 

Goodbye daffodils!

Watercolor sketch of daffodils in a vase

Hello tulips!

Watercolor sketch of tulips in a vase

Cherry Blossoms: Nothing Abides

Yoshino cherry trees in bloom on the University of Washington campus

“Since every variety of tree and plant comes into bloom in its own time in one of the four seasons, we prize the timeliness and rarity of the blooming of each. . . . Now what we call hana or ‘flowering,’ what we call ‘interesting,’ and what we call ‘rarity’ are not three separate things but really one and the same.  But all flowers eventually are scattered, none stays in bloom.  And it is precisely because it blooms and perishes that a flower holds our interest as something rare. . . . to know the flowering is first of all to know that nothing abides.”
— Zeami, from Kadensho, translated by William LaFleur

“Death is the mother of Beauty.”
— Wallace Stevens

Mother and child, cherry blossom viewing

Cherry blossom viewing carries with it a Japanese sensibility, the awareness of the ephemeral.  It is heartening to see such a diverse group of people enjoying the magnificent blooming cherry trees on the University of Washington campus.  These Yoshino cherry trees are a natural wonder.

The Quad at the University of Washington

Blossoms shimmer in the sunlight

Gnarly bark

Photographing a fallen blossom

Another blossoming tree on the U of W campus

 

 

No End to Delightful Things

“It seems as if one never could get to the end of all the delightful things there are to know, and to observe, and to speculate about in the world.”
— John Burroughs, from The Writings of John Burroughs, vol. 15, The Summit of the Years

Daffodils are always delightful, spots of sunshine after a gray winter.

Daffodils at Green Lake

Interlude

Cooking with my Rival Crock Pot

I’m getting ready to leave on a month-long adventure.  I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks tying up loose ends and making preparations.  This involved eating up some of the food in my freezer and pantry — a flurry of rhubarb pie baking to use up the last of the frozen rhubarb.  And cooking chicken in my crock pot with nine cloves of garlic, knowing that if it sat around for a month, the garlic would be old when I returned.

Stack of recently read books

I hauled out the lawn mower and gave the yard its first shearing of the year.  Always something of a milestone for the year.

One of the more pleasurable preparatory tasks involved managing my library account — suspending my list of holds so that my reserved items would not come in while I am away.  And hastily reading the stack of books currently checked out.  There were some good books there —

• Susan Wittig Albert’s journal from 2008 called An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days (I love that title)
• Gretel Ehrlich’s book about traveling in Japan in the year following the devastating tsunami called Facing the Wave:  A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami (in which she stands as witness to the heartbreaking and excruciating pain of loss and the unexpected joys of survival)
• Mary Coin by Marisa Silver, a fictionalized story about the lives of Dorothea Lange and the migrant mother in Lange’s famous WPA photo.
• Eighty Days: Nelly Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman about two young women, journalists and single, who in  1889 – 90 travel around the world by steamship and train in an effort to match or beat Jules Verne’s ’round the world in 80 days.  One woman travels east, the other west, and both beat the fictional travel record set by Verne’s hero.
• Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, one of the best books about writing that I’ve read in a long time.  Kidder and his editor Todd have around 40 years of experience crafting nonfiction books and articles, so they are worth listening to.  If I ever were to write more seriously, I would write nonfiction, so I found this book very inspiring.

I expect that I will write more about my adventures when I am back home, but while I am away for the next month I plan to take a (needed) break from writing new posts for my blog.  I will not be leaving you in the lurch, however.  Starting tomorrow (April 3rd), my blog posts will feature a new project, which will unfold in serial fashion over the next 30 days.  So please do continue to check in daily.  And although I am taking a break from posting and writing, I will be reading Comments from the road.  Your comments will keep me from getting homesick, so write (often).

Take care.

April Means “To Open”

“The word APRIL comes from the Latin root, aperi’re, “to open. ” . . . Buds and birds burst forth from nature’s womb, the fallow earth steadily fills, and eventually we emerge from our sleepy state in March and break out of the house.”
— Amanda Hesser, from The Cook and the Gardener

After a few days of partly sunny weather, nature has awakened in Seattle.  So many things are bursting into blossom and bud.  You can’t beat Seattle in April.  Here are some photos from a walk around my neighborhood:

Backlit pussy willows

Wispy willow spreading seeds

Unusual peachy daffodil

Sprightly orange centered daffodil

Fritillary buds

Fritillaries

Fritillary buds

Skagit Valley Daffodil Fields

Skagit Valley daffodil field

Washington’s Skagit Valley is well known for its tulip fields and the tulip festival which runs during the month of April.  But the bulb farmers there also plant fields of daffodils, which are coming into bloom right now.  One of the big growers, Roozengaarde, makes a bloom map available online each year.  It’s updated almost daily to show which fields of daffodils and tulips are currently in bloom.

Old weathered barn next to daffodil field, Skagit Valley

Old barn with daffodils

Following the bloom map will take you past scenes like these.  It’s pretty spectacular, even on a rainy day.  My Midwest mind is always tickled by seeing fields of bouquet flowers rather than corn, soybeans, and oats.

Mud in the daffodil fields

Daffodil in the Roozengaarde display garden

Old shed with daffodils

Nodding buds and blooms

Daffodils from the Roozengaarde display garden

Daffy Down Dilly
by Alice C. D. Riley

Dear little Daffy-down-dilly
First flow’r of the spring,
Dancing away with the breezes,
Gladness and sunshine you bring.

Daring the cold of the March winds,
Braving the forests and the snows,
Filling the woods with your glory,
Loveliest flow’r that blows.

Watercolor sketch of daffodils