Gardeners don’t see like the rest of us. Most of us walkthrough a garden with our vision shaped by nouns and adjectives – the names of the flowers and words like pretty.” But gardeners, I think, see space – borders and boundaries, horizontals and verticals, walls and vistas.
We admire and go on our way. The gardener is constantly spotting problems: a weed to be pulled, a flower that needs dead heading. an insect infestation, a bush ready to be pruned, anything, great or small, that intrudes on the orderliness of space. For every problem, though, there is a glimpse of possible improvement, a native species to be introduced, a hybrid to fill an empty space, a new rhythm to be established.
Can this way of seeing, I wonder, be transplanted, or, like a bouquet be brought into one’s study? With it would there come the know-how when to prune and when to let imagination flourish?
August 2023
Westport Island, Maine
Gardeners don’t see like the rest of us. Most of us walkthrough a garden with our vision shaped by nouns and adjectives – the names of the flowers and words like pretty.” But gardeners, I think, see space – borders and boundaries, horizontals and verticals, walls and vistas.
We admire and go on our way. The gardener is constantly spotting problems: a weed to be pulled, a flower that needs dead heading. an insect infestation, a bush ready to be pruned, anything, great or small, that intrudes on the orderliness of space. For every problem, though, there is a glimpse of possible improvement, a native species to be introduced, a hybrid to fill an empty space, a new rhythm to be established.
Can this way of seeing, I wonder, be transplanted, or, like a bouquet be brought into one’s study? With it would there come the know-how when to prune and when to let imagination flourish?
August 2023
Westport Island, Maine