After decades of spending most of my non-working, non-parenting time in the gardens, I am trying to take the yard surrounding me a bit less seriously. Perhaps it was being given a copy of the movie "Grey Gardens" by my daughter for Mother's Day a couple years back. That was kind of scary. But for whatever reason, I've come to think of needing a different kind of comfort zone in the green space surrounding my house. My time in the garden has always been my self-proclaimed therapy. I love seeing the succession of season and profusion of blooms, however short-lived and temporal. Or perhaps it is living in a place where the big enviromental picture is so incredibly beautiful that is seems a bit of folly to think that you could improve on Mother Nature in this neck of the woods.
For whatever reason, my gardens have decided to add whimsy as one of their defining features. Now flowers and plants can have whimsy - but you have to be a seasoned grower to get the humor in a curly willow or waving petunia. I think I'm going for a more instant smile or chuckle here. Life is short - laugh often. Plus, my passion for garden centers is somewhat matched by my love of cruising thrift stores for buried treasure. Wallah! - a seemingly perfect match.
While a few pieces of art in my garden are true pieces of sculpture, most are returnable, exchangeable gifts from the Goodwill. I say exchangeable because if this 'habit' becomes addictive, I'm going to have to rotate images to avoid turning into a cluttered roadside attraction. When did the pink flamingo become overly silly?
Cheshire Cat: If I were looking for a white rabbit, I'd ask the Mad Hatter.
Alice: The Mad Hatter? Oh no, no no...
Cheshire Cat: Or you could ask the March Hare. In that direction.
Alice: Oh thank you. I think I'll see him...
Cheshire Cat: Of course he's mad too.
Alice: But I don't want to go among mad people.
Cheshire Cat: Oh you can't help that. Most everyone's mad here.
(laughs maniacally, starts to disappear)
Cheshire Cat: You may have noticed I'm not all there myself.
...............Well, so.......if you enter the Purple Slipper Gallery and Garden..... my hope is that you will smile as you share a glass of wine or cup of tea. Afterall, gardening can't be all tilling and planting and weeding. Flowers are flirting and fleeting and fun. I guess that's the message I see now. They can inspire laughter as well as deep inspiration or profound thoughts. Life needn't be so entirely serious, or the toil of our passions so fully consuming that we forget to indeed stop to smell the roses.
I encourage you to click on the pictures for a closer sniff :)
I inherited the gardening gene from both of my grandmothers. I expect that means it will always be a part of what I was, am, will be. A window to my soul......and a glimpse of how I see the world around my homes. Yet it needn't be all that serious..or time consuming. We are afterall temporal, like the seasons we pass through. Virginia - and Annie Dillard in one of the essays she wrote there- taught me about felicity and fecundity. Maine will have other lessons to teach and learn.
When I closed on this house three years ago this week, I was delighted to arrive to the surprise of a bed of bright poppies spilling across the front of the house. What a happy flower! Now they are popping up in my driveway or between sidewalk stones. Delightful! Though I have added some lillies, sage, starfish, and such to keep them company, they will, perhaps, always be the landmark expression on the face of my homefront here.
“That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.”
-John Berger
