I have known a few passionate gardeners both here and in Europe, but only two of them really closely. My observations, then, rely on the scientific sample of n=2, and are thus pure speculation.

Gardeners need a number of traits to survive, much less be successful.

They need vision – a plan, a sense of design, the ability to translate from a piece of drawing paper to the visualization of how things look like. They need patience, because things evolve slowly. They need a high tolerance for lack of control, because each garden has its own mind, and things never work out as planned. They also need to like things ephemeral, or at least accept that state, because things happen quickly and are gone before you blink when it comes to blooming season.

Gardeners need to work hard and be oblivious to bad weather, or the daily wildlife in form of spiders, bugs, moles, mice, bats, mosquitos, the occasional snake or raccoon, to cite a few. Slugs, did I mention slugs? All of this is true whether you have a lovely small cottage garden, a functional garden with a bit of ambition, like my childhood’s which I described yesterday, or one of those estates that should be on a list of “most beautiful gardens to visit.”

The latter kind also introduces some additional requirements: you need to be able to lead a team and work with others, since the tasks cannot be done by one person alone, and you need to have the openness to accept your team mates’ ideas – since everyone who steadily tends to a large garden develops a sense of ownership. You need to be able to convey that you call the shots without feeling guilty and you need – let’s be blunt – some serious financial commitment, since large gardens are not a cheap passion.

Gardeners are not just rewarded by beauty and a sense of creativity. They constantly observe and facilitate a cycle of rebirth that potentially takes the sting out of thoughts of impermanence. Gardening chases the blues away. And working with your hands in the dirt, all of the smells and tactile sensations earth has to offer surrounding you, really focusses you in that moment, with all worries banished.

Banished, that is, until your back aches and your knees scream……..

And here are Blue Iris by Emil Nolde

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:

We conclude this week’s explorations with a location close to home: Oaks Bottom, a 141 acres nature preserve with a lake, marshland and little streams. Located in SE Portland, with views of downtown and the Willamette, it is home to many birds and other wildlife, in particular scores of herons due to nearby rookeries. Well maintained paths make for easy hiking, and around Christmas the adjacent train tracks are used for a Santa steam engine train which delights children of all ages. The park came into existence because of neighborhood action in the late 1960s when industrial development threatened and was eventually stopped with the city purchasing the area and building the preserve partially on a sanitation landfill.

Between the preserve and the river resides the Oaks Amusement park, one of the oldest in the country. Known as Coney Island on the Willamette it opened on May 30, 1905, 2 days before the Lewis&Clark Exposition.(Short history here:http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/oaks_park.html.) It is a sweet place to visit if you do not mind a high noise level from screaming kids on rollercoasters, loud music from the carousels and lots of voices on the megaphone calling for the next round of fun or lost children. The lead montage is based on a photograph of a little girl dancing there around the pavilion during May festivities.

Today’s painting is the 1916 Merry-Go-Round by Mark Gertler. A letter written by Gertler’s friend D. H. Lawrence in September 1915 mentions wounded soldiers in uniforms enjoying the rowdy entertainment at the fair. Another letter by Lawrence in 1916 describes the painting as “the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great and true.” This opionion was not widely shared, his work being scolded as modernist and decorative.  The painting is now judged as his reaction to World War I; Gertler was a conscientious objector and quite worried about being conscripted into the British Army.