Saturday, August 19, 2006







Lost Garden Part 3

Fall in the Lost Garden


"The garden is a mirror of the heart."

We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden."

"Darkening nights are drawing in Log fires are lit, the curtains close Gardens wait for the year to begin Inside gardeners warm their toes."
~ By David Squire

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
~ Rachel Carson

"But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness.
The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head ...
The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on."
~ Robert Finch, Poet

Tuesday, August 15, 2006














Lost Garden, part 2

Summer in the Garden

How grateful I am that we were given all this beauty and the opportunity to help in the creation of such loveliness.

"When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden." ~ Minnie Aumonier

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
--Greek proverb

"Cares melt when you kneel in your garden."


"But each spring...a gardening instinct, sure as the sap rising in the trees, stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground."
-- Lewis Gantt

"You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt."

"Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow

"In the Garden, my soul is sunshine."

"Where but in a garden do summer hours pass so quickly?"

"If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need."
~Cicero

"I garden, therefore I am."

Sunday, August 13, 2006











Memorium for a Lost Garden

Spring in the Garden

When we moved to the Back Pasture we left behind five bedrooms and our treasured garden. The new owners are fine people, but Garden Philistines. We went to capture some seeds from the perennial sweet peas along the fence line at the old place and I mourned the flowers and shrubs, struggling to get through this hot summer without adequate water. The house has been made into apartments, - perhaps one of them will be rented to a gardener who will take pity on the honey suckle and trumpet vines, the magnolia tree and all the plants in the border along the fence.

The sweet peas we want to perpetuate were planted on the orchard that my husband's grandfather started when he returned from the Alaska Gold Rush, and they still grow on the original orchard. We have carried seed carefully from place to place, and they grow tentatively in their first year in the new garden, here on the pasture.

Our new garden has been a delight to create, but in my memory are all the wonderful hours I spent, early in the morning and in the cool of the evening, revelling in the care of the flowers, - the roses and iris and phlox and daisies. I remember with love all the trees that my husband planted, - dozens and dozens on the three acres that made up the property. Almost all gone now, - yanked out to accommodate a market garden or fruit trees. Alas, alas....