to do list

Of all the to do list items that are starting to stack up, the one that I am putting up at the top is to stop and look at flowers more closely.

Georgia O'Keefe said that she painted large canvasses of flowers because nobody ever has the time to get down close and look at them.

The growing life of a garden, from beginning to end, in any given year, is very much a temporal experience, much like hearing a piece of music. And like listening to music, we suspend our ordinary understanding of time to enter the time of the garden.

Especially since perennials offer us only moments of their blooms, I think it is important to slow down a bit and watch them, observe them, touch them (and if fragrant, smell them). These flowers are so short-lived in their beauty, that to miss stopping and looking at them is to be impoverished.

Probably the very thought would drive most folk to the dentist. But then that's probably why they don't garden.

In Asian gardens, there is often a focus on a few blooming things, with the cycle of the flower becoming symbolic of our own human life cycles. I am not an Asian gardener, but there is something to be said about listening to the life of plants, their art and simplicity.

That's what I thought about this morning as Franklin and I did our morning inspection. Of course, he smells the scents of what animals have passed through while I hold a branch of forsythia, looking closely at the big yellow trumpets up and down, a particular that I often ignore for the stronger mass of general yellow.

This is looking like a good year for the daffodils. Most of my clumps in the beds are bold and sturdy, with lots of blooms. I am slowly moving ones out in the yard that fail to bloom (due either to loss of light because of the growth of trees or shrubs, or lack of food and good soil).

And the daffodils that I planted in late fall have finally started breaking through the dirt. The old dog lived after all.