Tired Gardener

Cherish them not, the ostentatious roses grown with care extravagant, the Tyrian fuchsias drooping with heaviness of over-nurtured bloom, and orchid-miming irises that speak too loud of opulence and sumptuous circumstance: cherish them not, O gardener, knowing how soon the desert breathes in every Babylon and withers all things that man has tilled and trained too often not for mere beauty's sake but only to prove the old Mammonian power; knowing how soon the lovely weeds half-disinherited return, and banished grasses break the squares and circles of the flowery plots and beard the creviced fountains. Turn rather to sand-verbenas yellow as the sun that flourish on the crumbling dunes, to yarrow, and the blackbird-ridden reeds and willows following the dark sunken channel of marsh-lost waters toward the sea. Turn rather where springs the pale and migniard mountain-phlox in basins granite-rimmed, and the dwarf alpine manzanitas make arabesques upon the sheeted stone; turn rather to lichens charting upon trunk and boulder the track of centuries unclocked: these shall be planted, these be tended never by swink and sweat of any laborer; and these shall flower the unmanned eternity of earth when the last empire dies, a fat mandragora uprooted by its rebel gardeners.