Saturday, March 7, 2009

Friends Birthing Gardens

Gardens grow from all sorts of things.  Desire, pictures in books, seeing someone else's...... 

One time in Iowa, I stopped, parked and walked up to the door of  a little house that was all dressed up in layers and patches of gardens.  Pantaloons, petticoats, skirts, coats, capes, scarves, shawls, bonnets, a yard playing dress up.  If a yard could twirl, and say, 'TA DA', this one did.  I knocked at the door hoping the one who gave birth to it was home.  She came to the door with a baby robin in her hand, it had fallen but couldn't fly yet.  He was eating raw ground hamburger bits inside instead of ground worms from his mom outside.  She was delighted to show off her handiwork birthed of joyful hardwork...... 

There were pieces of 'altered art' tucked here and there to surprise and stop me in my tracks. She said that every year she dug up another patch of grass to create another vignette of flowers. Have you ever felt like you stepped into the frame of another dimension?  Very hard to return to 'normal'......but the pictures in my head stayed.   What if someone stopped to knock on my door someday, because she let me in to her garden?  

When I was a baby beginning gardner without means to indulge in nursery plants, Jill, Bev, Jan and Mary would share their 'volunteer' babies with me, Joy split her hostas, Debi taught me how to fill containers.......

Usually, about this time of year, I go splurge on winter pansies.  Their smiling cheerful faces are contagious. 

Usually about this time of year, I get desperate for color, crazy for color, crave color!   Colors I've never even liked look delicious.  Wait a minute~there aren't any colors I don't like!  Brown maybe?  No, dirt's brown and I LOVE DIRT!    :)   I fall in love all over again when Craig brings me a yard of compost!  

I'm dreaming about making crepe paper flower garlands, swaths, wreaths, topiaries...... in all colors of the rainbow~sticking them in and hanging them everywhere.  Everywhere!   If you drive by and see weird water soaked bunched up things trailing everywhere-we didn't get pranked by kids.  I just traveled too close to the edge of grey, winter induced lethargy and caved - from color starvation......

"A salute, to the Maker of color"   (can't credit the author who coined that, sorry sweetie, but I love you even though we haven't met!)   



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