Flower for the Day Phlox 4-16-19

I grew up loving rock gardens. They have a warm 'feel' to them and I can easily imagine that they are inhabited by 'little people'. This probably resulted from my reading the Sunday Chicago Tribune comic strip called The Teeny Weenies that I would collect every week. This comic started in 1914 and ran for fifty years. It had been temporarily discontinued in the thirties and I began reading it in May of 1941 when it started up again. I was six years old. The Teeny Weenies were small people who were two inches tall who ran ordinary but interesting lives. It is easy picture them in my rock garden.

Phlox is the basic infrastructure of my rock garden. This years phlox is kind of scraggly probably due to this years drastic weather changes. Rain is necessary for the phlox but it results in a wilted crop.

That does not take away from the beauty of the blossoms. As with all small flowers they are enjoyed best 

while hunkered down close.

The Little House of Lost Play (Mar Vanwa Tyalieva)

by J R R Tolkien

 We knew that land once, You and I,  and once we wandered there in the long days now

 long gone by,  a dark child and a fair.

 Was it on the paths of firelight thought  in winter cold and white,  or in the blue-

 spun twilit hours  of little early tucked-up beds  in drowsy summer night, 

 that you and I in Sleep went down  to meet each other there,  your dark hair on your 

 white nightgown  and mine was tangled fair?

 We wandered shyly hand in hand,  small footprints in the golden sand,  and gathered

 pearls and shells in pails,  while all about the nightengales  were singing in the 

 trees. We dug for silver with our spades,  and caught the sparkle of the seas,then ran 

 ashore to greenlit glades,  and found the warm and winding lane that now we cannot 

 find again,  between tall whispering trees.

 The air was neither night nor day,  an ever-eve of gloaming light,  when first there

 glimmered into sight  the Little House of Play.
 New-built it was, yet very old,  white, and thatched with straws of gold, 

 and pierced with peeping lattices  that looked toward the sea; 

 and our own children's garden-plots were there: our own forgetmenots,  red daisies,

 cress and mustard,  and radishes for tea.

 There all the borders, trimmed with box,  were filled with favourite flowers, with 

 phlox, with lupins, pinks, and hollyhocks,  beneath a red may-tree;  and all the 

 gardens full of folk  that their own little language spoke,  but not to You and Me.

  
 For some had silver watering-cans  and watered all their gowns,  or sprayed each 

 other; some laid plans  to build their houses, little towns  and dwellings in the 

 trees. And some were clambering on the roof;  some crooning lonely and aloof; some 

 dancing round the fairy-rings  all garlanded in daisy-strings,  while some upon 

 their knees  before a little white-robed king  crowned with marigold would sing 

 their rhymes of long ago.

 But side by side a little pair  with heads together, mingled hair,  went walking 

 to and fro  still hand in hand; and what they said,  ere Waking far apart them led,

 that only we now know.

---

Poem by J R R Tolkien