A Concrete Example — Key Points
The poem A Concrete Example is written by the poet Reginald Arkell about a neighbour named Mrs. Jones.
Mrs. Jones maintains a very peculiar garden that is primarily filled with various stones.
The stone garden contains a crazy path, a lily pond, a rockery, and an unusual sundial.
Mrs. Jones considers the sundial with its strange device to be rather nice and charming.
She carefully grows tiny and delicate plants in the narrow spaces between the garden stones.
The speaker humorously remarks that the plants are so small they might have been planted with a pin.
Mrs. Jones invites the speaker to visit her stony garden to observe a special flower.
The speaker and Mrs. Jones stand and converse about the delicate flower for a quarter of an hour.
The poem ends with humor when Mrs. Jones reveals that the speaker is actually standing on the flower.
The overall tone of the poem is light-hearted, amusing, and humorous.
The title carries a double meaning referring literally to stony materials and symbolically to a clear example.
A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens that are dried, pressed, and mounted on paper.
The famous Rock Garden of Chandigarh features wonderful sculptures made out of recycled materials.
The flower garden of Raj Bhavan in Bhubaneswar spans ten acres and includes ornamental and medicinal plants.
Apologies can be made informally to friends or expressed using formal language to school authorities.