Hello,
As time counts down until the West Seattle Garden Tour, I’m distracted by weeds/trip hazards/rain. I’m also thinking about why I garden — if you listen closely on a hot day filled with heavy lifting, you may hear me mutter, “it’s supposed to be fun…”
In many ways I feel like I’ve always been a gardener, but it wasn’t until I began tending my present plot that I’ve been free to explore what that means, to root in and establish if you will. To be clear, my garden today is only the most recent incarnation of the many (many, many) gardens that have come (and gone) from this landscape over the years — although a few stubborn/resilient plants persist.
Gardening: is an active verb and a creative practice.
Gardening: is also an idea, an intention, and an approach to finding our place in nature.
I studied art in college but for years I shied away from pursuing my limited understanding of design principles, let alone creating any work. Then one day I looked up, covered in dirt, sporting terribly unfashionable tan lines, and no doubt exhilarated/exhausted and came to a new way of looking at this land-based creative practice. Making a garden is like being inside a work of art as it’s being created. I paint pictures with plants, sculpt the landscape, and choreograph an experience. And, in a good year, I get berries!
In her memoir “Life in the Garden”, Penelope Lively wrote: “To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time.” In other words, gardens collapse time, generations even, stitching together all the various parts of life into a fleeting moment as ephemeral as a ripe strawberry or as vulnerable as a tender seedling on a hot day. The flavor of a ruby red strawberry is like swallowing the sun which offsets the sting of losing a zinnia seedling that I’ve been tending for months.
Making a garden allows me to manifest an idea while juggling practicalities like weeds, unexpected heat waves, a devasting freeze, too much rain, not enough rain; the list goes on and on. My garden is also a daily practice in the art of letting go, a safe place to learn how to navigate wins and losses beyond my beds and borders. My garden grounds me in the present and allows me to invent the future. Thank you for listening to my garden TED talk. I’m so glad you’re here.
ox Lorene
Plume Poppy or Garden Lunacy
I’ve arrived at that inexplicable place where I’ve forgotten the hassle and headache of eradicating a colonizing perennial that once ran roughshod in the front garden, only to find myself once again considering adding it back into a border in another part of the garden.
Shop Talk
Make someone’s day — Send a postcard.
Each set of 12 postcards, Pansies, Pink or Shells contains 2 each of 6 unique images. Cards are 4 3/4” square packaged in a vellum envelope. Printed on sturdy paper with a durable matte finish on image side, uncoated on back for recording your message. USPS compliant, 1st class stamp. Sets with envelopes also available.
Enter: SUMMERPOST at checkout to get 20% off any postcard purchase.
Briefly, Colors
During our recent 4-day getaway I dutifully packed up my painting supplies but, for the first time in 7 1/2 years, I didn’t make any color studies. It felt odd having “nothing to show for” my days. Then I noticed how I was noticing: the rugged rusty bark of lodgepole pines, an acid green clump of lichen picked up on a pathway, lupines blooming along the highway. All of which tells me that my practice has become a part of my days whether I pick up a brush or not.
And so it begins…
Our quick trip coincided with the first Pacific Northwest heat wave. Even tho it was dark, when we arrived home I immediately went to the garden to see how my plants fared without me. And that’s how I came to harvest the first bouquet of sweet peas by the light of the Strawberry Moon.
Well, if harvesting sweet peas under the light of the Strawberry moon isn't magic, I don't know what is.
I have a small plot jammed with flowers, succulents, evergreens et al. It has evolved organically rather than by design. I said to a friend recently that it was a bit random. He replied, not random, just like an abstract painting in progress.