When I returned from my trip a month ago, the air was heavy with the grape soda scent of Texas mountain laurel. In the darkness, I could make out vaguely that the front yard was overgrown—it must have rained a lot when I was gone—but I didn’t pause to look. I just stumbled indoors and into bed.
That’s how I knew I wasn’t a gardener any longer; a real gardener would have been prowling the garden with a flashlight to see what had happened in his absence. As I used to do.
In the last couple of weeks, however, I’ve felt the familiar twinge, the gardening urge stirring. The unusually cool, wet spring is not what roused it. I know that in the Austin gardener’s year, “April is the cruelest month ” because it is the moment of full flower before deadly, baking summer. It is full of promise, signs of hope, that sends people to the nurseries to buy and plant like people flocking to a bullish stock market, that infectious enthusiasm to buy at the height.
As it turns out, it wasn’t the fair weather or pretty flowers that piqued my interest in the garden again. It was organizing and migrating my files from one computer to another. Going through over 8000 photos taken these last 20 years, I didn’t become depressed by my failures and negligence (as I have sometimes done in these most recent years of heat and drought). Instead, I was reminded that what I liked most about gardening is that the garden is never the same twice.
Every day is a new opportunity to look. The garden is full of thrills and surprises. I’ve been gardening here 22 years and last week was the first time I ever saw a rat snake! So the garden piques my curiosity; it encourages me to observe and record, to compare, research, and analyze. And that makes me want to get up each day to rush outside with my morning coffee to see what’s up.
I’ve never succeeded in “making” a garden, designing or making a living space. My garden is more like a laboratory, a place to tinker and experiment. Mostly, though, I just wander around watching and wondering.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
T. S. Eliot The Waste Land
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
Natalie Smart – 2015-05-01 14:41:23-0400So many beautiful plants and flowers to ‘discover’ in this natural paradise – thanks for sharing! 🙂
M Sinclair Stevens – 2015-05-01 14:51:56-0400+Natalie Smart You’re welcome. However, there is nothing natural about it. Gardens are human constructs, composed and cultivated.The framing and the timing of the photograph are also thoughtfully, purposefully, artfully composed to communicate a specific impression. The moment is fleeting. No such place exists except as T.S. Eliot would put it in “memory and desire”.