There is, in Eng­lish poet­ry, a long tra­di­tion of gar­den­ing poems. Such poems find rich asso­ci­a­tions between the delib­er­ate act of design, the orga­niz­ing of nature, and the art of poet­ry. While Jere­my Rock​’s, ​“Ten­der” does not slav­ish­ly echo the poet­ry of gar­den­ing of the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, (the hay-day of this tra­di­tion), one sens­es in his con­tem­po­rary take, a recog­ni­tion of the impulse of humans to see in gar­den­ing, some­thing of the quest and delight in beau­ty that we find in poet­ry. At the end of the poem, Rock’s descrip­tion of car­ing for ten­der plants that he ren­ders as dream­ers allows him to cel­e­brate the deeply human­iz­ing pow­er of the imag­i­na­tion, the pow­er, in oth­er words, of poetry.