Peaceful Morning

To recover from my busy weekend, today I went to the Botanical Garden. As I walked along, I thought of a stanza from Andrew Marvell's poem "The Garden":

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men :
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow ;
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

Solitude, though, was hard to find; the garden bustled with tours and school groups. At first I was annoyed by the chattering, and thought the Garden of Eden must have been nice with only 2 people in it. (Marvell takes it one step further and imagines Adam's bliss before Eve's creation; he says, "Two paradises 'twere in one / To live in Paradise alone.") But then I sat on a bench and let the murmur of people blend with the traffic noise and the smell of flowers. A caterpillar crawled across the bench's wooden arm:



Some plants and trees were still recovering from the recent cold snap,


but the tulips were glorious.







As I moved further from the entrance, I saw fewer people. Outside the Japanese Garden, a red-winged blackbird perched in a tree overhead:



I don't know what this character means, but I found it striking:


As I left the garden, I felt calmer and more centered. As Marvell concludes, "How could such sweet and wholesome hours / Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!"