There’s a truth that we can’t envision what we’ve never seen. I lived for so long in an apartment in Chicago that I’d lost the rhythms. There was an Easter Vigil were I walked out into the church garden and saw the daffodils. And an odd voice in my head said, “Why did they put plastic daffodils out?” Of course they hadn’t. I was that out of touch.

The oddest thing about buying a house, is that with it comes a garden. I was 44 and I had the first garden of my adult life. I had a terrifying case of constipated gardening. I planted everything everywhere. I even planted the hell strip in front of the street and got in trouble with the city fathers. I put in roses of Sharon, roses of all kinds, quince, five kind of lilac, day lilies everywhere, bee balm, Russian sage, pinks. dogwood, I couldn’t pass a garden center. I planted or mulched every square inch. I brought in a weeping juniper and white cherry tree. Eventually I ran out of land. And began to simply watch it happen, season after season   All time is spiral in a garden Time is measured in one season after another. The season of tulips, of alliums, of lilies, of blackberries, of tomatoes, and the dreaded zuchinni. They cycle through faithful, every year. So the flowers themselves sudden began to pop up in my quilts.

I discovered that sheers made the best flower petals because petals are see through. I discovered that no petal is the same shape size or color as any other in the flower Which meant I needed to use easily 20 c0lors for a larger flower. learned that every flower is potentially a bird feeder. I learned I could be outside in a yard and not be attacked. It was a time of intense learning. Then I had to learn to let it go. The first October, I lost Gabriel, my big golden cat the day the leaves fell from the maple. Fall had fallen and all I could do was weep at the base of the roots. I cried until after Christmas. Then the garden catalogs started to arrive.

There’s a wonder a bout cycles. You watch things die. You watch things come back. I believe in resurrection for many reasons. But my garden is perhaps the most tangible. The cold came and went and then the cycle came back.

I walk through my garden in the winter and can see all of the dead waiting resurrection. Some things, like helborus rose, just refuse to go down. But even the tenderest roses poke their head up. I 

I also came to realize I wasn’t the only gardener. There were bees, humming birds, praying mantises and frogs all carefully tending the plants. I came to love and look for their hands in my garden. It’s there’s as much as mine. After all, we all live there.

Tags: flowers sheer fabrics, gardening, gardens

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2013 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Art Outside the Box, art statement, series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.