The Flowers Lyrics
A child has learned the names of some flowers from the nurse, and decides that gardener's garters, shepherd's purse, bachelor's buttons and lady's smock must be fairy names. The sixteen lines end with a wish to be small enough to live among them.
The Flowers
All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.
Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames -
These must all be fairy names!
Tiny woods below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!
Fair are grown-up people's trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where, if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all.
Printed from https://nurseryrhymes.co/the-flowers/
- Type
- Poems for Children
- Written by
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Tune
- Read it with a sense of discovery, and slow down for the last four lines
- Best for ages
- 4 to 9 years
What Does The Flowers Mean?
The first verse is a list of real flower names that the child has learned from the nurse: gardener's garters (a striped garden grass), shepherd's purse (a small wild plant with flat, heart-shaped seed pods), bachelor's buttons (a name for several round-headed flowers), lady's smock (a pale pink meadow flower) and the tall Lady Hollyhock. Said all together they sound like a list from a story.
The child reasons from there: they sound like fairy things, so they must be "fairy names". The second and third verses follow the idea down to ground level. There are "tiny woods" below the boughs, tree-tops of rose or thyme, and fairies who "weave a house" in the shade. Thyme is a low herb with small leaves that grows in a mat close to the ground.
The last verse turns on size. Grown-up people have their trees, but the child thinks "the fairest woods are these" and wishes, "if I were not so tall", to live there for good. Lie down in the grass with a child and the tiny woods are easy to see.
History and Origin
The poem is in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), a book that Robert Louis Stevenson dedicated to his own nurse, Alison Cunningham. It is fitting that the first words of this poem are "All the names I know from nurse".
Learning Activities
- Flower names walk: in a garden or park, find a plant for each name you can, and ask what a fairy might do with it.
- Tiny wood: kneel by a patch of moss or thyme and look at it as a wood, with a grown-up pointing out the tree-tops.
- Fairy house: build a small house from twigs, bark and leaves under a bush, and leave it there.
- Invent a name: make up a fairy name for a plant or weed and say what it is used for.