I even remember the fabrics I have seen but could not buy. There was a rich olive-green silk across which stole an enormous black shadow, laden with the wind and thunder of an approaching tempest. And another sort of silken fabric, pale aquamarine, shimmering with ripples reminiscent of wood grain and lake water; above which floated at regular intervals a pair of plum blossoms as big as tea bowls, iron-edged and silver-filigreed, like the multihued stained-glass windows of a medieval church, its translucent red panes set between leaded borders.

Eileen Chang, Written on Water

January

sage-green sea kale, blue bugloss, red poppy, yellow sedum

sky blue borage

Rugosa double de Coubert Harrisonii, Rosa mundi rose of the world with its crimson and blush striped flowers, an old sport from the apothecary's Rose officionalis the rose of Provins, Rosa Foetida bicolor bright yellow and red, and Cantabrigiensis pale yellow

houseleeks and sedums, thrift, dianthus, saxifrage, campion, wallflower, purple iris, calendula, curry plant, rue, camomile, columbine, shirley poppy, santolina and nasturtium

February

the blue stars of wild forget-me-nots, pristine snowdrops spread out in the welcoming sun, wild columbine, ominous fritillaria

gorse is a blaze of golden flowers forced by the wind into an agony of weird shapes, twisted branches wrung out like washing. It's the only winter flower on the Ness.

the long headed poppy, P. dubium, and the field poppy, P. rhoeas

Rosemary - Ros marinus, sea dew - herb of remembrance and friendship - Ophelia's bouquet, tied with ribbons and carried at weddings, and placed in the hands of the dead.

(Zonal pelargoniums! Geraniums the Queen of the flower garden; Paul Crampel the true scarlet, the one and only colour of a geranium, is a rarity.)

Daffodils - bulbs were used by Galen to glue together great wounds and gashes and carried by Roman soldiers. The name daffodil, d'asphodel, is a confusion with the asphodel. They were also called Lent lily.

valerian

Narcissus - from the Greek narkao (to benumb). Socrates called the plant 'crown of the infernal gods' because the bulbs, if eaten, numbed the nervous system. Perhaps Roman soldiers carried it for this reason.

Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

hieroglyphics

It thunders, howls, roars, hisses, whistles, blusters, hums, growls, rumbles, squeaks, groans, sings, crackles, cracks, rattles, flickers, clicks, snarls, tumbles, whimpers, whines, rustles, murmurs, crashes, clucks, to gurgle, tinkles, blows, snores, clasps, to lisp, to cough, it boils, to scream, to weep, to sob, to croak, to stutter, to lisp, to coo, to breathe, to clash, to bleat, to neigh, to grumble, to scrape, to bubble. These words, and others like them, which express sounds, are more than mere symbols: they are a kind of hieroglyphics for the ear.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books (Notebook A.36)

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy a greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. Lydia Davis

     Through the window
on the branch
against the evening winter sky
a blue bird
rests on the branch
and a natural shaking will take
its place it flew off
departing the recoil
slight and brief to me
who am that branch standing.

     Will be
a form of breast and nodding head
an arrival from the vast mid-west,
where I was on a flat nearly black plain
where evening has
the same color,
empty as that branch filled
with the summer dense locust
and silent under a burden of months
when summer waved away,
a slight recoil,
and snow began to come.

Where sparrows are
the only lifting in the winter
along sentinel fences, among
the rows of stubbles and thin lights
of small towns

Where the light
and all such branches of whipping hickory
start my sadness not violently,
as a yearning to be gone,
but softly, as the remote pleasure of the solstice.

Purple is fashionable twice
at this season (of lifting our heads)
—it is November, and I am with
the shadow of a bird
gone elsewhere now like a shield
across my own hollowed self
a red barn
where the hayropes hang like webs
and the starving sparrows sit
in the lofts
not chirping
for the new wings coming
up to roost.

Ed Dorn, "The Sparrow Sky"

chance

In 1927, Mann's preferred translator for The Magic Mountain either fell or jumped out of a window. Soon after that, David Horton reports, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf moved to confirm his agreement with Helen Lowe-Porter.

Kate Briggs, This Little Art

Her eyes were closed. When she opened them

she said: ‘Lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there’s skin behind it.’

John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook