The Flowers – Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith

The Flowers – Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith
from A child’s garden of verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1905

The Flowers
from A child’s garden of verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1905

All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener’s garters, Shepherd’s purse,
Bachelor’s buttons, Lady’s smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.

Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames –
These must all be fairy names!

Tiny woods below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!

Fair are grown-up people’s trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where, if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all.