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Paul Valéry, from a poem featured in The Idea of Perfection; The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry

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Photographed by David Hamilton 1973

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Well somebody told me You had a boyfriend Who looked like a girlfriend That I had in February of last year It’s not confidential I’ve got potential

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Hand kissing is sacred, high romance and I think we need to revive it.

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Girl Scout Lou Henry Hoover gardening, ca. 1918.

-from the Hoover Library 

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Linda Gregg, from a poem titled "The Defeated," featured in Too Bright to See: Poems

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Jeffrey Silverthorne

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“When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added. Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting. A replica of earth except there was love here. Doesn’t everyone want love? He waited many years, building a world, watching Persephone in the meadow. Persephone, a smeller, a taster. If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all. Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night the beloved body, compass, polestar, to hear the quiet breathing that says I am alive, that means also you are alive, because you hear me, you are here with me. And when one turns, the other turns— That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness, looking at the world he had constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind that there’d be no more smelling here, certainly no more eating. Guilt? Terror? The fear of love? These things he couldn’t imagine; no lover ever imagines them. He dreams, he wonders what to call this place. First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden. In the end, he decides to name it Persephone’s Girlhood. A soft light rising above the level meadow, behind the bed. He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you’re dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.”

— Louise Glück, A Myth of Devotion

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The bog garden of Great Saling Hall in Essex.

Creative Gardens, 1986