"The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose." ~George William Curtis

“The rose speaks of love silently, in a language known only to the heart.”

*Roses from my garden

“You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.”  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.  ~Emma Goldman

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.  ~Beverly Nichols

“A single rose can be my garden...a single friend, my world.” ~Leo Buscaglia

"Perfumes are the feelings of flowers."

 ~Heinrich Heine, The Hartz Journey

"Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk

undisturbed." ~Walt Whitman

"I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."

~Claude Monet

“Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?” 
― Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems

"A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring."  ~The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams

'"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us."

~Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

“But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.”~Anne Bronte

"And she was fair as is the rose in May." ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

“They are not long, the days of wine and roses. Out of a misty dream, our path emerges for a while, then closes, within a dream.” 
― Ernest Dowson, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson

In All Things of Nature There Is Something of the Marvelous.~Aristotle

Some lovely thoughts and images on this fine spring day~

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”  ~Henry David Thoreau

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kind.” William Shakespeare

“I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees.  The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.

It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day.  It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.  Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me – I am happy.”  

~Hamlin Garland, McClure’s, February 1899

“You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.”

~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church, I keep it staying at Home -With a bobolink for a Chorister, And an Orchard, for a Dome.” 

~Emily Dickinson

“Joy all creatures drink At nature’s bosoms…”  ~Friedrich von Schiller, “Ode to Joy,” 1785

“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”  ~Jane Austen

“I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.  Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”  ~Wendell Berry

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.”
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.  This is not done by jostling in the street.”  ~William Blake

“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”  ~Helen Keller

“To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, – to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.”
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV

“Fieldes have eies and woods have eares.”  ~John Heywood, 1565

“You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness – perhaps ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things…”  

~Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, “Birds – And a Caution”  (Thanks, Corinne)

“Butterflies are self propelled flowers.”  ~R.H. Heinlein

“If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.”  ~Author Unknown

*Images of the green-gold trees, the baby goose and kitten, the Shenandoah Valley in early spring and the nesting duck are by my mom, Pat Churchman.  The black swallowtail butterfly is by my daughter Elise.  Dark Hollow Falls in the Blue Ridge Mountains is a royalty free pic.

***For gardeners, nature lovers, anyone who thinks fondly of country life, or is just plain human…you might enjoy my nonfiction book out in kindle now, in nookbook by April, and soon out in print with beautiful pics, a 2012 EPIC eBOOK FINALIST, Shenandoah Watercolors.