July

Poems, Quotes, Folklore, Myths, Holidays
Sayings, Links, References, Lore
Ideas, Garden Chores

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Valley Spirit Center, Red Bluff, California

Quotes      Links      References      Garden Chores      Photos      Months

Quotes

The Month of July
Poetry, Quotations, Sayings, Facts, Information, Quips, Aphorisms, Lore

"The serene philosophy of the pink rose is steadying.  Its fragrant, delicate petals open fully and are ready to fall, without regret or disillusion, after only a day in the sun.  It is so every summer.  One can almost hear their pink, fragrant murmur as they settle down upon the grass: 'Summer, summer, it will always be summer.'"
-   Rachel Peden 

"Tis now the summer of your youth: time has not cropped the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them."
-   Edward Moore

"The Summer looks out from her brazen tower,
Through the flashing bars of July."
-  Francis Thompson, A Corymbus for Autumn  

"For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul."
-   Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Old Player

"Many public-school children seem to know only two dates: 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion."
-   Mark Twain

"Answer July—
         Where is the Bee—
             Where is the Blush—
         Where is the Hay?

  Ah, said July—
            Where is the Seed—
            Where is the Bud—
            Where is the May—
            Answer Thee—Me—"
-  Emily Dickinson, Answer July

"Do what we can, summer will have its flies."
-   Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots and gillyflowers."
-  Sara Coleridge, Pretty Lessons in Verse  

"That beautiful season the Summer!
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light;
and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood."
-   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"The linden, in the fervors of July,
Hums with a louder concert. When the wind
Sweeps the broad forest in its summer prime,
As when some master-hand exulting sweeps
The keys of some great organ, ye give forth
The music of the woodland depths, a hymn
Of gladness and of thanks."
-  William Cullen Bryant, Among the Trees 

"There are plenty of men who philander during the summer, to be sure, but they are usually the same lot who philander during the winter-albeit with less convenience."
-   Nora Ephron

"We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night."
-   Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Grass is the cheapest plant to install and the most expensive to maintain."
-   Pat Howell 

"People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy."
-   Anton Chekhov

"Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?"
-   Robert Louis Stevenson, Bed in Summer 

"peeling pears-
sweet juice drips
from the knife blade" 
-   Shiki

"Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability."
-   Sam Keen  

"Here is the ghost Of a summer that lived for us,
ere is a promise Of summer to be."
-   William Ernest Henley

"A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay.
A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon.
A swarm of bees in July is not worth a fly."

"What has happened to summer,
That's what I want to know.
Is she on a vacation -
Who knows where did she go?
Tell, what was she wearing;
A zephyr breeze and rosebud
Or grass and wild berry?
Could she be honeymooning
With spring or early fall
Or has she gone so far away
She'll not return at all?"
-   Dorothy Ardelle Merriam, One July Summer

"I know I am but summer to your heart, 
and not the full four seasons of the year." 
-   Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Between the dusk of a summer night
And the dawn of a summer day,
We caught at a mood as it passed in flight,
And we bade it stoop and stay.
And what with the dawn of night began
With the dusk of day was done;
For that is the way of woman and man,
When a hazard has made them one.
Arc upon arc, from shade to shine,
The World went thundering free;
And what was his errand but hers and mine --
The lords of him, I and she?
O, it's die we must, but it's live we can,
And the marvel of earth and sun
Is all for the joy of woman and man
And the longing that makes them one."
-   William Ernest Henley, Between the Dusk of a Summer Night

"An onion can make people cry but there's never been a vegetable that can make people laugh."
-   Will Rogers 

"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4th, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.  You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism." 
-   Erma Bombeck

"Oh, the summer night
Has a smile of light
And she sits on a sapphire throne."
-   Barry Cornwall

"Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds." 
-   Carl von Linnaeus   

"I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer."
-   Brendan Behan

"How sweet to move at summer's eve
By Clyde's meandering stream,
When Sol in joy is seen to leave
The earth with crimson beam;
When islands that wandered far
Above his sea couch lie,
And here and there some gem-like star
Re-opes its sparkling eye."
-   Andrew Park

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."
-  Tennessee Williams

"I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips."
-   Violette Leduc

"O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain, 
For purple mountains majesty 
Above thy fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee 
And crown thy good with brotherhood 
From sea to shining sea!"

"We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest."
-   Philip Gilbert Hamerton

"I pledge allegiance to my flag
and the Republic for which it stands,
one nation indivisible
with liberty and justice for all."
-  Francis Bellamy, 1892

"felling a tree
and gazing at the cut end - 
tonight's moon"
-   Matsuo Basho

"The summer night is like a perfection of thought."
-   Wallace Stevens

"You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook's year.  I get more excited by that than anything else."
-   Mario Batali

"The hearts that love will know never winter's frost and chill.  Summer's warmth is in them still."
-   Eben Eugene Rexford

"The glowing Ruby should adorn
Those who in warm July are born,
Then will they be exempt and free
From love's doubt and anxiety."

"Why do I make no poems? Good my friend
Now is there silence through the summer woods,
In whose green depths and lawny solitudes
The light is dreaming; voicings clear ascend
Now from no hollow where glad rivulets wend,
But murmurings low of inarticulate moods,
Softer than stir of unfledged cushat broods,
Breathe, till o'er drowsed the heavy flower-heads bend.
Now sleep the crystal and heart-charmed waves
Round white, sunstricken rocks the noontide long,
Or 'mid the coolness of dim lighted caves
Sway in a trance of vague deliciousness;
And I,--I am too deep in joy's excess
For the imperfect impulse of a song."
-   Edward Dowden, In July

"Loud is the summer's busy song
The smallest breeze can find a tongue,
While insects of each tiny size
Grow teasing with their melodies,
Till noon burns with its blistering breath
Around, and day lies still as death."
-  John Clare, July 

"If the first of July be rainy weather,
It will rain, more of less, for four weeks together."
-  John Ray,  English Proverbs 

"A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins."
-    Laurie Colwin

"After winter comes the summer.  After night comes the dawn.  And after every storm, there comes clear, open skies."
-   Samuel Rutherford

"Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels."
-   Mark Twain 

"July is the seventh month of the year according to the Gregorian calendar.  It was the fifth month in the early calendar of the ancient Romans.  The Romans called the month Quintilius, which means fifth.  A Roman Senate renamed the month to Julius (July) in honour of Julius Caesar, who was born on 12 July.  The Anglo-Saxon names for the month included Heymonath or Maed monath, referring respectively to haymaking and the flowering of meadows." 

"It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato."
-   Lewis Grizzard

"Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour's in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course
in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?"
-   Richard Wilbur, Praise in Summer

"It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong."
-  John Cheever 

"What a beautiful, sunny morning.  It makes you happy to be alive, doesn't it?  We can't let the sun outshine us!  We have to beam, too!"
-   Takayuki Ikkaku

"Across the open common land
shines glowing purple floral blooms
The bumble bee can hardly stand,
as flowers' scent is rising fumes

And lies there in the summer shade
a resting deer quite joyfuly
for in this beauteous sunlit glade
all's observed by sent'nel tree

This tall oak stands by sparkling stream,
whose water splashes grass and rock,
reflecting in its azure gleam,
the woodland plant and dandy clock

While goes beneath the cloudless sky,
amidst a warm and dreamy breeze,
a squirrel idling, passing by,
past numerous, careless, floating seeds."
-   Stephen Patrick, Sleepy July in Skipwith Common  

"Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it."
-   James Gibbons Huneker

"Well I’m a-gonna raise a fuss, I’m gonna raise a holler
About workin’ all summer just to try an’ earn a dollar
Everytime I call my baby, to try to get a date
My boss says, no dice, son, you gotta work late
Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do
’cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues."
-   Eddie Cochran, Summertime Blues

"The hum of bees is the voice of the garden." 
-   Elizabeth Lawrence

"Summer has set in with its usual severity." 
-   Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Home grown tomatoes, home grown tomatoes
What would life be like without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love and home grown tomatoes."
-   John Denver, Home Grown Tomatoes

"Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time." 
-   William Cowper

"The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the newmown hay and the wood pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of grose and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling "The Roses are Blooming in Picardy" and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again."
-   Samuel Beckett, Watt

"For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul."
-   Oliver Wendell Holmes

"There ought to be Gardens for all Months in the year, in which, severally,
things of Beauty may be then in season." 
-   Sir Francis Bacon

"People take pictures of the Summer, just in case someone thought they had missed it,
and to proved that it really existed."
-   Ray Davies

"The consolations of space are nameless things.
It was after the neurosis of winter. It was
In the genius of summer that they blew up
The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds.
It took all day to quieten the sky
And then to refill its emptiness again...."
-   Wallace Stevens, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

"The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the newmown hay and the wood pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of grose and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling "The Roses are Blooming in Picardy" and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again."
-   Samuel Beckett, Watt

"All your renown is like the summer flower that blooms and dies; because the sunny glow which brings it forth, soon slays with parching power."
-   Alighieri Dante

"Winter is an etching, spring is a watercolor, summer and oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all."
-   Stanley Horowitz

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."
-   John Lubbock

"The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing."
-   Patrick Kavanagh, Inniskeen Road - July Evening

"Cricket to us was more than play,
It was a worship in the summer sun.
-   Edmund Blunden

"Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit.  A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world."
-   Ada Louise Huxtable

"If any sense in mortal dust remains
When mine has been refin'd from flower to flower,
Won from the sun all colours, drunk the shower
And delicate winy dews, and gain'd the gains
Which elves who sleep in airy bells, a-swing
Through half a summer day, for love bestow,
Then in some warm old garden let me grow
To such a perfect, lush, ambrosian thing
As this. Upon a southward-facing wall
I bask, and feel my juices dimly fed
And mellowing, while my bloom comes golden grey:
Keep the wasps from me! but before I fall
Pluck me, white fingers, and o'er two ripe-red
Girl lips O let me richly swoon away!"
-   Edward Dowden, In the Garden VI: A Peach

"Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language."
-   Henry James

"O for a lodge in a garden of cucumbers!
O for an iceberg or two at control!
O for a vale that at midday the dew cumbers!
O for a pleasure trip up to the pole!"
-   Rossiter Johnson

"It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below."
-   Rebecca H. Davis

"There is but one way to celebrate a plump ripe plum - polish it on your shirt sleeve, see your face in the silvery black shine then open wide, lock your lips on the skin, sink your teeth into the sensuous center suck in the flesh, slurp up the juices.  Ah! The purple of it all."
-  James Ciletti, Ode to a Ripe Plum

"A lot of parents pack up their troubles and send them off to summer camp."
-   Raymond Duncan

"O summer day beside the joyous sea!
O summer day so wonderful and white,
So full of gladness and so full of pain!
Forever and forever shalt thou be
To some the gravestone of a dead delight,
To some the landmark of a new domain."
-   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"What harm is there in making 100,000 people happy on a hot summer afternoon?"
-   Gordon McLendon

"It's designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone."
-   Bartlett Giamatti 

"Whenever I was upset by something in the papers, Jack always told me to be more tolerant, like a horse flicking away flies in the summer."
-   Jacqueline Kennedy

"Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing Night!
Night of south winds!  Night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding Night!  Mad, naked, Summer Night!"
-   Walt Whitman

"It will not always be summer: build barns."
-   Hesiod 

"The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer."
-   Denise Levertov

"There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart."
-   Celia Thaxter

"Then followed that beautiful season,
Called by the pious Acadian peasants the Summer of All-Saints!
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new - created in all the freshness of childhood."
-   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

"The Indian Summer, the dead Summer's soul."
-   Mary Clemmer

July

Links and References

Almanac for Gardeners - Monthly Activities and Lore

August: Quotations, Poetry, Celebrations, Bibliography, Links, Gardening Chores. 

Celebrating Lammas - School of the Seasons 

Cuttings - July   Short poems by Mike Garofalo.  

Early August Feast, Christian Lammas, Celtic Lughnasa , Greek Adonis Festival,7th Celebration of Neo-Pagan Craft Year, Late Summer Feast

Daoist Health and Spiritual Practices

Flowers: Quotations, Lore, Myths, Resources

Fourth of July Poems

Fourth of July Poems and Quotes   

Fourth of July Poetry 

Fourth of July - American Ethos and Spirituality  

The Green Man   Bibliography, Links, Quotes, Notes, Lore, Poems. 

Green Way Blog

Green Wizard

How Glooskap Found the Summer - Native American Lore 

In Nature's Honor: Myths and Rituals Celebrating the Earth.  By Patricia Montley.   Boston, Skinner House Books, 2005.  Index, 379 pages.  ISBN: 155896486X  VSCLC. 

July Facts, Customs and Traditions 

July: Quotes, Poems, Lore

July - Poem Hunter  

June: Quotations, Poetry, Celebrations, Bibliography, Links, Gardening Chores. 

Lammas: Celebrating Fruits of the First Harvest.   Anna Franklin and Paul Mason.  St. Paul, Minnesota, Llewellyn Pub., 2001.  Bibliography, index, 276 pages.  ISBN: 0738700940.   VSCLC.  

Lammas - Wikipedia    

Links about Lughnasa, Lammas, First Harvest Festival 

Months of the Moon - Lore   

Months:  Quotes, Poems, Links, Gardening Chores

One Druid's Journey - The Green Wizard's Notebooks 

Poem Hunter - July

Preparing for Lammas, Lughnasa, Late Summer Feast 

Pulling Onions.   By Michael P. Garofalo.  Over 600 aphorisms for gardeners and lovers of the Green Way. 

Quotes for Gardeners    Over 3,500 quotes arranged by over 140 topics. 

September: Quotations, Poetry, Celebrations, Bibliography, Links, Gardening Chores. 

Ceisiwr Serith's website and links on Americanism. 

Summer Quotations  BellaOnline: 103 Quotations. 

Summer: Quotations, Poems, Lore, Gardening Chores

Summer Quotations  31 Quotes   Creative Quotations

Summer Quotations: The Poem Hunter

Summer Quotes 

Summer Quotes About.Com

Summer Quotes and Quotations by ThinkExist

Summer Quotes, Summertime Sayings

Summer Poetry and Poems (110 Poems)

Summer  -  Quotes, Poems, Sayings and Quips for Gardeners

Summertime - Links for Educators  

Taoist Health and Spiritual Practices

Ways of Walking

Zen Poems

If ant hills are high in July,
Winter will be snowy.

A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay 
but a swarm in July is not worth a fly.

Clichés for Gardeners

Weather Lore

Astrological Signs:  Cancer,  June 22 -  July 22

Astrological Signs:  Leo,  July 23 - August 22

July  Birthstones:  Ruby

Flowers:  Larkspur and Water Lily

Dieties:  Apt (or Apet), Athena, Sothis, Spider Woman, Rosea

July: The Mead Moon

July Gardening Chores

Red Bluff, North Sacramento Valley, California, USA

USDA Zone 9

Water plants: take advantage of cool morning hours, use daytime shade.
Water plants deeply and less frequently.
Water potted plants carefully on very hot days.
Mow lawns, but don't mow low. 
Mulch and compost: straw, cuttings, leaves, twigs, chips, shredded paper, garbage.
Water compost pile areas.  
Manage cutworms and other garden pests.
Weed around vegetables and shrubs. 
Plant for autumn vegetable crops. 
Use straw mulch to help control weeds and cool soil.
Maintenance on lawn mowing equipment.
Pick and save or eat fresh vegetables and fruits.
Dry fruit in sun. 
Water plants.  Use irrigation ditch water efficiently and effectively. 
Get up early to work in the cool morning hours. 
Thin out excess fruit on trees.
Mulch with straw, chips, compost.  
Train vines on support structures.  
Read, listen to music, relax and sleep in the shade.
Tend to and enjoy annuals in bloom.  

July Gardening Chores and Tips

July Gardening to Do List - All Zones

Oregon State University July Tips

Earth Wise Creations July Tips - Zone 9

The Gay Gardener - Monthly Chores

Top Garden Projects for July in the Pacific Northwest by Ed Hume

52 Weeks in the California Garden by Richard Smaus 

Garden Chores for the California Central Valley, Foothills, and Bay Area

Gardening, Zone 8

The Garden Helper Tips for July - Northern U.S.

New York Botanical Garden - Zone 6, July Gardening

Master Gardeners Tips

Monthly Gardening Calendar for July - Zones 5 - 6

Clemson University, Zone 7, Gardening Tips

The Gay Gardener - July

Our screened back porch.  A comfortable place to sip coffee on a July morning. 
Since the porch faces to the west, it is cool and shady in the morning.  2006. 

The shaded garden outside our screened back porch.  Four pecan trees shade the garden. 
Our afternoon temperatures in July are often over 100 degrees F.   2006.