Gardens I Have Known

from a 15th century tapestry

Oto's garden

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Lucille noticed something I had not. She took me on a picnic to the rose garden in front of the UNC planetarium. I hadn't known there was a rose garden. I've only been there how many hundreds of times?? When I saw it, I said, "That's landscaping, not a garden." We got into a philosophical discussion about what the definition of a garden is and what our first impressions of gardens were and how these showed the differences in our personalities. My introduction to gardens was in Bahia where I was put out to nap behind the stone house amidst dense foliage, chattering monkeys, songbirds, exotic flowers, and cool shade.There was an element of danger, secretiveness, too. The next garden to impress me was the Garden of Gethsemane when we lived on the Mount of Olives. I told Lucille the cloisters and atriums of the various schools I attended, paintings such as "The Unicorn in the Garden" which was the cover art for a book of poetry by Anne Morrow Lindbergh seem to add up to some kind of clue to why I like small beautiful spaces, set apart places. Lucille needs the freedom of open expanses. I said, "In California when everybody else was marveling at the sunsets on the ocean, I was delighting in the tide pools. Once when at Air Bellows Gap on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Douglas asked what I was doing. He said I was missing the view. I couldn't comprehend such a remark because I was viewing something wonderful--a tenacious tiny wildflower struggling to grow out of a wall of crackling boulders." Lucille mentioned the idea of this being a political bent to see the local rather than the global, to need a purpose as well as a pleasure, to enclose myself to guard against the destruction of beauty. We discussed what I think of as garden material. Yes, I like fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables. Randy Walker of Roanoke asked me to write two lines of his four line poem. He started with a carrot scene. My reaction was, "What in the world could I have to say about this poor doomed carrot??" But we did our assignments. Lucille pointed out two things. One was that, once again, it echoed of a political statement. "It shows what will happen to the other vegetables if they ignore what happened to the carrot." Also, it reflects my contemplative mentality. My gardens have to have a purpose, a boundary; they are guarded in the same way as what I said about being an islander. An island, after all, is the perfect garden. I see now that the Garden of Eden was my most lasting influence--bounded by angels, incomparable, with the purpose of naming the animals and being good stewards of the Earth. I'm back to why I like short stories, aren't I? On the bus today I was thinking about the unicorn and I added something else to my garden definition. It differs from landscaping because of the creatures who live in it--the faeries, gnomes, slitheries, chatterers, and small beings who sing and croak. There is a quality of magical kingdom to my gardens. Whether it's the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park, or Oto's garden as seen above, "my" garden is the "detail" in the larger artwork.
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Randy's poem:
The silent scream of a carrot being diced
could be heard from the vegetable bin.
And yet, amid the ruckus and the din
All looked away, left her, unaided, sliced.
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.....the blessings of secret flowery nooks or panoramic vistas, whichever or both appeal to you, be yours....