Spring Flower Gardens, Duke University

Passmoore, Works Of Alexander & I.V.

-Sarah Duke Gardens Blooming, With Breeze Elizabeth von Arnim's Elizabeth and her German Garden contains a passage that seems appropriate here: "How happy I was! I don't remember any time quite so perfect since the days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar on my eleven o'clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with dandelions and daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately now than then, and never would endure to see them all mown away if I were not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their little faces again as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I lived in a world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three lawns,-- they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,-- and under and among the groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few stray periwinkles and Solomon's Seal, and all the birdcherries blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to the joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs--masses and masses of them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the side of walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could see, shining glorious against a background of firs. When that time came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies flowered under the south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful, and grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days seemed to melt away in a dream of pink and purple peace." Note the oddly effusive affection for Dandelions -- the "unsightly eyesore" whose eradication Americans spend millions on annually. Series Description: Scenes from the Harvard of the South, in Durham, North Carolina. Formerly Trinity College, it rose to prominence after a tobacco magnate opened his checkbook in the 1930s. The Walltown Series serves as a contrast. See also dmoz.org/.../Colleges and Universities/.../North Carolina/Duke University/.