Gardens

They are far from being the same.

Every once and awhile (or make that far too often) we seem to be living in worlds composed only of abstract and partisan ideas.  Such static is coming in loud and unclear again these days. 

It is time, if you’ll allow, for a column about gardening. 

I visited a number of local gardens last week on a garden tour.  I found an interesting difference between gardens.  Many illustrated the best in landscaping.  Plants assigned boundary duty, giving homes stature, like full-dressed guards on duty before the gates of palaces. 

I thought about this.  Our homes are our castles.  The green lawns our motes. And we sign our ownership with leavy foliage and cultured flowers.  We keep them in “beds.”  We organize them into rows.  We thus lay claim to property and assert our own importance.

They are a patrician barrier, a way of distancing the house from the street, the common street of traffic.  They say to the passerby.  Pause and observe, but stand back.   We best show our nobility at a distance. Please not too close. 

There is another kind of “garden.”  Plants as much at home as their brother animals.  The gardener not a control center, instead a partner with all that thrives on this patch of land. 

In such spaces, over time, the priorities of human need are lessened.  New plants are added.  And others lost. Trees are trimmed or removed, opening up new opportunities for sun and moisture.

There is an eye for arrangement, for shape and color and size, but not a forced design.  The gardener is more a guardian, a forester of this track of land.  He or she is a protector of the land and its life, caring for the soil and all plants and animals. 

Harmony with diversity.  As art it is unique.  Not only does color, shape and placement matter, but texture and odor.  It is a celebration of life that extends over time, with new divas and subtle choruses.  The seasons overlap and the garden displays new growth amidst old display. 

It is for itself.  It does not service a need, a cause or an idea.  It does not accent or frame.  It exists for the truest joy we can know.  The expression of life amidst sun and shade, in bright skies and storm.  For the good of us all.  Alive, whole, and always reaching away from the moment, into new beginnings, heralds of a future world that commands allegiance to neither plan nor purpose.