Wisteria

Like early, airfilled grapes
The clusters bobble on their austere
Stiff stick branches.
Soap-film translucent
Lavenders
Curve and blend
With opaque whites
And purple blues.
The blossoms burst this morning
As Japanese paper flowers do
In water.
A magic color explosion
Before the green
Workaday leaves
Take over.

 March 19, 1978

 "Of the pleasures incidentally connected with the garden, the power of making presents of the fruits of one's own labors is certainly one of the highest.  A rare bouquet to one who can appreciate its loveliness, a dish of blushing fruit, or a basket of choice vegetables, contributed on some special occasion to a friend's bill of fare--or a rich cluster of grapes to bless the fading sight of some poor consumptive, to whose parched lips they seem almost a foretaste of heaven,--affords a degree of satisfaction to the giver from being the results of his own skillful labor, which can be but faintly realized by him whose gifts involve only a demand upon his purse."

H.W.S. Cleveland,  Landscape Gardening,  1855. 
Quoted in Cornell historian Aaron Sach's wonderful Arcadian America (2013). 


Cleveland influenced "western" landscape design and was a collaborator with Olmsted on Brooklyn's Prospect Park, a codesigner of the renowned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, etc