Not sentimental about Valentine’s Day. Not, not.

But I seem to have accumulated all this pink. And when Bill Linsman saw it, he said: That looks like a blog post.

So I thought about the great American landscape architect Fletcher Steele, about what he said about pretty. I read it years ago, but it popped up again today:

“I want all my places to be the homes of children and lovers. I want them to be comfortable and if possible slightly mysterious by day, with vistas and compositions appealing to the painter. I want them to be delirious in the moonlight…. I believe that there is no beauty without ugliness and that it should not be otherwise. Both are capable of stinging us to live. Contrast is more true to me than undeviating smugness. The chief vice in gardens is to be merely pretty.”