Quick Summary

The Poem in One Glance

Mrs. Jones loves a garden full of stones and tiny plants. Her neighbour thinks the plants are so small that they hardly matter.

Then Mrs. Jones shows him one flower she clearly treasures. There is just one problem: even after talking about it for fifteen minutes, he still cannot see it.

Think before you read: Is the flower really impossible to notice—or is the speaker simply not looking at the garden the way Mrs. Jones does?

Meet the two people who matter

Mrs. Jones

The speaker’s next-door neighbour. She has an unusual garden and takes real pleasure in its stones, strange features and very tiny plants.

The Speaker

Mrs. Jones’s neighbour and the voice telling the poem. He is amused by her garden and thinks the tiny plants “don’t mean anything at all.”

Where are we?

The poem is set in Mrs. Jones’s garden , next door to the speaker.
It is an unusual garden with a crazy path, lily pond, rockery, sundial and lots of stones .
Between the stones grow very small, delicate plants that Mrs. Jones notices and values much more than the speaker does.

The Real Challenge The speaker can describe the big features of the garden perfectly well. What he cannot do is notice the tiny things that matter to Mrs. Jones . That difference between what the two neighbours see is what the poem turns into a joke.

We first meet Mrs. Jones , the speaker’s next-door neighbour, through her unusual garden. It is full of stones and contains a crazy path, a lily pond, a rockery and a strange sundial. Keep this in mind: the large, hard features of the garden are very easy to notice.
Mrs. Jones likes these unusual features. The speaker calls the sundial device “strange” , while she thinks it is “rather nice.” The two neighbours are already looking at the same garden in different ways .
Mrs. Jones also grows little plants between the stones . They are so delicate and small that the speaker thinks they hardly matter at all. Mrs. Jones notices the tiny plants; the speaker almost dismisses them.
The speaker jokes that the plants are so tiny that Mrs. Jones must put them in the ground “with a pin.” The joke makes one thing very clear: in the speaker’s mind, these plants are almost too small to see.
One day Mrs. Jones invites the speaker into her garden. They stand there talking about one flower for a quarter of an hour . Fifteen minutes of discussion makes the flower sound important enough that we expect the speaker to know exactly where it is.
But the speaker finally asks, “Where is this lovely thing?” Mrs. Jones gives the answer in one short line: “You’re standing on it.” The joke lands: the man who thought the plants were almost too small to matter has failed to notice the flower directly under his feet.
The ending makes the whole poem funnier because the problem was never that Mrs. Jones cared too much about tiny plants. The speaker simply did not see what she saw . The poem stays playful, but it also leaves us thinking about attention, way of seeing things and what different people consider valuable .