Every spring I lose my house —
it likes to disappear —
behind the flowers and bushes
that grow so fast round here.
No more bare old branches,
no more empty beds;
there’s greenery and colour
that everywhere turns heads.
Spring wakes up my garden,
puts magic in the air,
along with different scents
a-drifting here and there.
Springtime at an old miner’s cottage, Creswick, Victoria. Photo by Ginette Pestana
Hello, Daphne, by the fence,
aren’t your flowers full of scents!
You’ve been asleep all winter long,
now you’re blooming sweet and strong.
You spice the breeze and fill the air,
your flowers white, your fragrance rare.
The moment all your blooms appear,
you tell me that spring is here.
Photo credit Ginette Pestana
Why is it called a bearded iris?
There’s not a whisker in sight.
Unless, of course, it had a shave
sometime in the night.
I think it looks just great
without a bristling beard,
and it if had a moustache
that would look very weird!
Bearded iris. Photo by Ginette Pestana
See the flowers
all pop out.
See the leaves
grow all about.
So much colour
all around,
like a paintbox
upside down.
How can flowers grow a beard,
And do they need to shave?
It seems a very funny way
For flowers to behave.
Do they use a razor,
Or will some clippers do?
I think bearded irises
Are rather weird, don’t you?
In a Polish village,
opening to the sun,
I found all these flowers
when spring had well begun.
What a splash of colour,
I was lucky to be there,
where ancient wooden houses
huddled round the square.
Half asleep I pulled up my blind
and saw two men from Mars!
They were in the garden, watching me,
too big for any vase.
With special alien fingers
and huge galactic eyes,
no wonder my friend Philip said
they’d come down from the skies.
Australian Children’s Poetry 