“In a children’s art class, we sat in a ring on kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off whiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell as the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson—as shouldn’t it be? Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world.”

Eudora Welty

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“…if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.”

Ray Bradbury

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Ray Bradbury

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“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”

Ray Bradbury

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“The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.”

Piet Oudolf

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“I have seen the poor boy when he came to a tuft of violets in the wood, kneel down on the ground, smell of them, kiss them, & depart without plucking them.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.”

Emily Dickinson

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“One of my resolutions for the year is to learn how to identify more of the trees and flowers where I live. Of course, once you learn the names of trees and flowers, you want to know their personal histories as well—so I have a great pile of botanical guidebooks growing on my bedside table already.”

Elizabeth Gilbert

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“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!”

Tennessee Williams

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“Roses on the bush are sisters on the plant and first cousins in the vase. As one might expect, something of their common character has passed into the vase—thinning out their kinship.”

Malcolm de Chazal

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“On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.”

John Steinbeck

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“I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

J. D. Salinger

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