Now, while many gardens are asleep under the frost, let's give thanks for the pleasures they gave thoughout the year--beauty, repose, satisfaction, hope, vitality, fragrance, memories, and a hundred other earthly delights.
Contentment is the greatest gift of a pleasure garden. It's hard to carry a grudge when children are skittering across the lawn under the sprinkler, or when old friends stop by to inspect this year's crop of roses. There's peace when we dig alone and companionship when we share the garden's beauty with others.
We also find a sense of permanence in a garden. "I plant the thorn and kiss the rose, but they will grow when I am dead," the poet Anne Spencer noted. Lilacs bloom for generations, peonies can live for half a century, and tulip trees and boxwood hedges can outlast a stone house.
One of the nicest things to do for a new house or to mark special occasions like births, weddings, anniversaries, and even deaths, is to plant a tree. There's something comforting about knowing the oak you plant will be offering shade for someone well into the next century.
A Drunkenness Of Scents
Fragrance is another great gift form the garden, which offers up "a drunkenness of scents," as Vita Sackville-West wrote. One whiff of a beloved flower in a winter-weary room can awaken memories more quickly than photographs in a yellowing album. We may forget familiar faces and names, dates may evade us, events may blur in our mind's eyes, but the smell of a certain flower can transport us back to yesterday in an instant.
Who doesn't have memories of a mother's or grandmother's roses or lilacs perfuming the lazy summer mornings of their youth? Or of sweet-scented lavender plucked from a garden of long ago and scattered among snowy white sheets in the linen closet? A sprig of lily of the valley in an anniversary bouquet can recall one's wedding day as if it were yesterday, and the fragrance of a mock orange stealing through an open bedroom window can capture the essence of a hundred childhood bedtimes.
Every May, for instance, the sweet, heavy scent of lilacs awakens my memory of a row of lilacs that grew in the garden my mother lovingly tended for more than forty years. I can see her again in my mind's eye, tall, silver-haired, and regal, cutting lilacs for the house. Sometimes she'd walk along the flagstone path to the rose arbor and add more flowers to her bouquet. I loved to walk there with her when the iris and peonies were rippling ribbons of color on either side of the path. Strange, how flowers last so long if they're tucked away in the back of your mind.
Iris On The Breakfast Table
Cut flowers in the house add a small but priceless pleasure to everyday life. What could be a better way to start the day than coming downstairs spring, summer, or fall and seeing a bouquet of homegrown flowers on the kitchen table?
A child's homemade bouquet from the garden--a helter-skelter bunch all jammed together with their stems caught up by
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