This week I will contemplate flowers and gardens. Given how the world around us has burst into bloom it seems a good timel for a celebration. I will start with photographs of early spring buds that heralded things to come.

I grew up in a large garden, in fact quite a few acres in the middle of flat farmland. The garden was really four separate areas, all divided by beech hedges and old stone walls, that reflected what little warmth there was and were covered by espalier plants and fruits. There was the field which supplied us with potatoes, corn, cabbage and other staples for food. It also had a section for strawberries and cut flowers. There was the kitchen garden, which had salads, beans, peas, herbs and so on and a greenhouse with a warm and cold section. There was an old large cherry tree in that garden on which we climbed and hung our swing. There was a large wall-enclosed meadow that had all the other fruit trees, the currant and gooseberry, raspberry and blackberry bushes. And then there was the official “garden” surrounding the house, stands of landscaped old trees, lawns, rhododendrons, a formal rose bed, and border beds with seasonal plantings – tulips, then summer phlox, irises, sweet william, delphiniums, and in the fall asters and zinnias. If all this sounds somewhat romantic, it wasn’t.

But it was beautiful and it instilled in me a love for nature and a bit of knowledge about flora. It also brought home the tremendous amount of work a garden requires, and how much it takes to feed a family, how weather dependent one is and how quickly change takes away what you cherish. When I visited the village some 40 years later, most of the garden had made room for a housing development. The formal garden still existed, but was somewhat neglected, although someone had made it into a kind of sculpture park, with interesting art work from around the world.

My own garden these days is as wild and weedy as can be, left mostly natural, and neither fed nor poisoned. It suits me.

 

And here is Vincent van Gogh’s Almond Tree: