You may remember that Sisyphus was relegated by the gods to push a rock uphill until after a massive effort
he reached the top at which time the rock rolled back to the bottom the hill where he had to start pushing his
rock up the hill forever. That's how it can be in the garden. It is rare when you read something that could have come out of your own mouth. This last week-end Sarah Ball wrote such an article for the Wall Street Journal Magazine of which she is Editor. Her article mirrors what I have noticed about my garden. Sometimes I have the garden and sometimes the garden 'has' me. What Sarah writes really came out of my mouth and I thank her for it.
onet changed the canon with his landscapes and his lilies. Today, climate change, species diebacks, heavy tourism and radical shifts to commercial horticulture have made his Giverny gardens a physically crushing battle to maintain. Can they truly persist as the artist once envisioned them? Can a landscape whose trajectory, inevitably, is to die, live on as unchanged as the masterpieces it inspired? A passionate gardener, I'm a pathetic passenger on the hobby's well-known sine wave. At the end of a day in the garden, your fingernails are black. Your body aches. Your arms and wrists are lashed with thorn-snags, rashes or sunburn. You've fallen so woefully short of the Pinterest ideal, there's really no point. But you go inside and step out of muddy gear. You scrub your hands back into their day job. Wine is poured. Defeat (proportionally) ebbs. And a temptation to soak your eyes in your day's work now overwhelms. You peek out the window, then you walk back out. The chiaroscuro of your effort has reversed: Instead of seeing every immovable root, planting flaw, stubborn weed, pest-eaten stalk, you see again the color, the life, the bee-bobbing blooms, the tender buds. Hope returns. Worse still, new ideas creep in. It's really so beautiful, when you think about it. How hard could it be to get back out here tomorrow?! Sarah Ball |
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