editors-from-wales

"As far as western Europe is concerned, the 's story began in Turkey, from where in the sixteenth century, European travellers brought back news of the brilliant and until then unknown lils rouges, so prized by the Turks. In fact there were not lilies at all but tulips. In April 1559, the Zürich physician and botanist saw the tulip flowering for the first time in the splendid garden made by Johannes Heinrich Herwart of , . He described its gleaming red petals and its sensuous scent in a book published two years later, the first known report of the flower growing in western Europe. The tulip, wrote Gesner, had 'sprung from a seed which had come from or as others say from '. From that flower and from its wild cousins, gathered over the next 300 years from the steppes of Siberia, from Afghanistan, Chitral, and the , from Isfahan, the Crimea and the , came the s which have been grown in gardens ever since. More than 5,500 different tulips are listed in the International Register published regularly since 1929 by the in the Netherlands."

"For an extrovert April scheme of brilliant yellow and red, intolerable to a melancholy poet such as Eliot, combine a good clear-coloured such as x superba "Crimson and Gold" with groups of s and single early s."

"Though there are exceptions in all species, many useful border plants — s, s, members of the , s — have foliage that is at best undistinguished, at worst down right ragged. Careful placing of foliage plants will disguise these shortcomings very well. They bring an outstanding variety of form to mixed plantings: fat rounded leaves of , feathery plumes of , stiff sword shapes of and ."

"The book opens like a , with the author trekking after native guides along a snake-infested trail through a in the wilds of . Then — after a plant-gathering side trip with an apothecary in 1629 into the wilds of Kent — we find her riding "with horsemen through the of ". Clearly, it is a member of the band of intrepid English woman explorers who will be leading us through the taxonomical wilderness."

"All of my gardening coats have been my husband's cast-offs. He is sufficiently bigger than me for the coats to be roomy and snug. They all have the same faint smell of wet dog which I find strangely comforting and they are all well endowed with pockets. Why do tailors think that men need more pockets than women? Surely it should be the other way round."

"My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a priest of the Church of England in Wales ... He was, as it turned out, certainly a boozer, a womanizer — this I had always known about him ... He was also, interestingly enough, very much a sort of a disappointed writer ..."

"cultivated the role of and/or witch, and — in the (1979) — rewrote the with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute."

"that he cares for nothing except what might commend itself to a virtuoso Pagan, and thinks only as men thought before Christianity awoke them to the consciousness of sin, of suffering, and of immortality."

"... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could see through to the inside, a radical realist. Lessing's initial creative roots lie in this ..."

"The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He said that fiction was a waste of time, the opium of the bourgeoisie, that you had to get a real grip on the facts of life."

"life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable."

"... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that the communicants got watered-down from Boots the chemist in , over the border."

"Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the , excuses for getting out of the (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. ... He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times he had come home pissed and incapable."

"I want to do this well."

"Sexual Politics by Kate Millett [published in 1970]. The box was open, the genie was out and I couldn’t put it back in."

"There is an extra loss for a Welsh poet writing in English, and that is, the longing for Welsh, the secret language.. of all the centuries of speech and song."

"Listening to a Gillian Clarke poem is an intensely sensual experience, concrete as it is musical."

"If civilisation drowns"

"There is no such thing as a silent poem."

"It's unnecessary to introduce magic into the explanation of physical and biological phenomena when in fact there is every likelihood that the continuation of research as it is now practiced will indeed fill all the gaps that Sheldrake draws attention to."

"This century has been so rich in discovery and so packed with technical innovation that it is tempting to believe that there can never be another like it. That conceit betrays the poverty of our collective imagination."

"John Maddox, the editor of Nature... retired in 1995. In August of that year, Maddox wrote an editorial entitled "Is the Principia Publishable Now?" in which he questioned whether or not Newton would get his ideas published today, given the current practice of peer review. Maddox speculates on what a reviewer would have written on receiving the script... He toys with the idea that Huygens (a contemporary... and opponent of Newton's ideas) would have written caustically about the gravitation ideas of Newton—"by what means, pray, does the author fancy that this magic can be contrived over the great distance between the Sun and Jupiter and without the lapse of time?""

"The gray-green stretch of sandy grass, Indefinitely desolate; A sea of lead, a sky of slate; Already autumn in the air, alas! One stark monotony of stone, The long hotel, acutely white, Against the after-sunset light Withers gray-green, and takes the grass's tone."

"And I would have, now love is over, An end to all, an end: I cannot, having been your lover, Stoop to become your friend!"

"Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance."

"He knew that the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd, and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness is not a necessary virtue."

"Sweet, can I sing you the song of your kisses? How soft is this one, how subtle this is, How fluttering swift as a bird's kiss that is, As a bird that taps at a leafy lattice; How this one clings and how that uncloses From bud to flower in the way of roses."

"They pass upon their old, tremulous feet, Creeping with little satchels down the street, And they remember, many years ago, Passing that way in silks. They wander, slow And solitary, through the city ways, And they alone remember those old days Men have forgotten."

"I have laid sorrow to sleep; Love sleeps. She who oft made me weep Now weeps."

"The wind is rising on the sea, The windy white foam-dancers leap; And the sea moans uneasily, And turns to sleep, and cannot sleep."

"O my child, who wronged you first, and began First the dance of death that you dance so well? Soul for soul: and I think the soul of a man Shall answer for yours in hell."

"Emmy's exquisite youth and her virginal air, Eyes and teeth in the flash of a musical smile, Come to me out of the past, and I see her there As I saw her once for a while."

"My life is like a music-hall, Where, in the impotence of rage, Chained by enchantment to my stall, I see myself upon the stage Dance to amuse a music-hall."

"The gipsy tents are on the down, The gipsy girls are here; And it's O to be off and away from the town With a gipsy for my dear!"

"They weave a slow andante as in sleep, Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white; With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keep A treachery of silence; infinite."

"I heard the sighing of the reeds At noontide and at evening, And some old dream I had forgotten I seemed to be remembering."

"I have loved colours, and not flowers; Their motion, not the swallows wings; And wasted more than half my hours Without the comradeship of things."

"What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves.... He must have the passion of a lover."

"Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders."

"Here in a little lonely room I am master of earth and sea, And the planets come to me."

"My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring."

"The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world."

"All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices."