flower
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.
East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 5.
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.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), viii.
I think you would like the chestnut-tree I met in my walk. It hit my notice suddenly, and I thought the skies were in blossom.
1862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), 308.
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.
Jan.? 1842 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 277.
My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 449.
Rose, where did you get that red?
Poem written by an elementary school student, in Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children, by Kenneth Koch (New York: Vintage, 1974), 39.
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!
Camino Real (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2008), 114.
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.
Sens-Plastique, trans. by Irving Weiss (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2008), 141.