A Garden: Nature’s Springtime Wardrobe of Many Colors

 

 From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

Surveys reveal consistently that by a wide margin, green and blue are the favorite colors of all of humanity across the globe—green in its call to the spirit of land and all of its contours and accessories, and blue for the sky and water—in essence, those colors most suggestive of our Earthly home. One of the most popular ways we get up close and personal with this magical blue and green orb that anchors us to the cosmos is by way of gardens.

Artists, artisans, and photographers heed in their work this “call of the heart” on the part of human beings, this spiritual yearning for Mother Earth, to run our fingers through Her hair, metaphorically speaking. Claude Monet’s revered paintings of his sumptuous gardens at his estate in Giverny, France are famous examples, canvases revelatory of his singular engagement with his world, underlain principally in effervescent greens and blues. But we don’t have to travel to France to find inspiring gardens. They are everywhere within easy reach of most of us. Two special gardens near me come to mind:

Located on the southern outskirts of my home city in the Midwest region of the USA is a particular garden designed and tended exclusively by an elderly female gardener named Shirley. When I knew her, she was well into her nineties, and although her husband and contemporaries had passed on, this spritely soul sported replaced knees and hips, new body parts she put to good use every day the weather permitted, digging and pruning and dead-heading in her enormous perennial flower garden. It was a garden in which she and statues of Buddha, of Saint Francis, and of Heaven’s Angels greeted their visitors upon their arrivals and departures. While she hedged her bets in the diversity of her garden statuary, sometime during the passage of her era, attending to her garden became Shirley’s reason for living.

The other one is found a distance north of my city on an eastern embankment of the picturesque Scioto River, designed and tended solely by a woman of advanced years by the name of Teresa. At the time I knew her she was mourning the recent death of her husband but also searching bravely for her own footing in the world. Teresa was subdued then within the contours of her tragedy, but this petite bundle of Italian exuberance wouldn’t be down for long. Anyone could see this in the messages throughout her garden, one of layer upon layer of sloped, visual feasts of plants tumbling the hillside to the very rim of the river. At the garden’s summit, the portion of it closest to the house, was a sweet, little fountain-pool hosted in its center by a statue of a tiny angel. It came to my mind intuitively that therein resided Teresa’s memories, dominated by her husband by virtue of their many decades together. Teresa’s garden was a veritable memoir of her marriage, enshrined in the bearing of that teeny concrete garden angel, as well as in the poppies, hollyhocks, black-eyed Susans, and other flowers nestled among a grand selection of trees and bushes.

Gardens inspire some of us to extract their meaning on canvases, in photographs, in crafts; for others, they provide a reason for living. For still others, their gardens hold their memories. If you are like me, this spring provides an opportunity to resurrect a garden that fell to neglect last spring in the pandemic’s lockdown. There are as many reasons to experience gardens as there are plants comprising them, and whatever your motivation, the time is nigh to get back to it with abandon. In the warm days to come, give your spirit wings in a garden, nature’s springtime wardrobe of many colors, a sartorial splendor set against Earth’s fundamental blues and greens.

!!COMING SOON!!

Linda Lee Greene’s next book:

A novella titled

GARDEN OF THE SPIRITS OF THE POTS

A Spiritual Odyssey

#gardening, #gardens, #MidwestGardens, #PerennialGardens, #SciotoRiver, #ClaudeMonet, #GivernyFrance, LindaLeeGreene