READER, I recently discovered a secret garden. Ready with my camera, I decided to take a stroll down my street and capture some of the beautiful summer blooms.
Slowly making my way I found and captured the most perfect wine-colored and white dahlia, feminine ruffled petaled hot pink roses, a creamy white rose with a gold eye in its center and raining petals at its side, as well as almost vintage-like tiny very pale clusters of blushing ballerina pink rosettes. Some were belllike, super tall, just drooping sunflowers, plus sweeping, swinging weeping willows, a spreading sunset colored orange and yellow day lily, ubiquitous deep yellow black eyed susans and the wildly growing, fragrant, long lavender herb with silvery-sage stemmed bushes, buzzing with their bees and fluttering with butterlies.
When I reached the very last house on the street I saw the tallest climbing crimson rose bushes Ive ever seen. They must have been 15 feet high!
There was someone nearby bent over the soil with gardening gloves on, digging. I paused to ask her whether these roses were hers and whether it was OK to take a picture of them. She said she did indeed plant the roses, and graciously obliged the photograph.
Somehow, this woman Jane and I got to talking. Jane moved into her house 20 years ago. One day she was pulling weeds from her front yard when her neighbor asked what she was doing. Pulling weeds, she answered. Her neighbor told her those were flowers! Jane knew nothing about gardening 20 years ago, not even the difference between a flower and a weed.
She was walking me through her stunning gardens encircling her home, showing me different gardens she had planted different summers, naming the years. There were tall, vertical deep maroon velvety chenille-like amarynthus flowers, with pale sage and maroon veined leaves those high rose bushes and countless other plants.
This was not a manicured, perfect landscaped garden, but a more wild, organic planting with personality.
Jane was telling me details about each of the plants, such as the dye of the amarynthus plant that was used by Indians, as well as their nutritious value.
She said she intentionally did not go for the landscaped look for her garden, but for an unplanned, natural one. For me a garden is more of a tapestry than a landscape.
BUT then. Then! Jane opened the gate to her backyard . . . and reader, what can I say other than, yes, I really truly and literally did discover a jaw dropping, exquisitely magnificent, secret garden!
And on my very own street! To think it had been there, unbeknownst to me, for 20 years. You really never do know what treasures are right around you.
My first impression of these treasures hiding behind the gate was garden upon garden of roses as far as the eye could see, like an old sprawling English rose garden at a grand countryside manor.
But as I began walking through the pathways of the gardens with Jane, I saw such a variety of flowers. Jane clearly had a gifted eye and these secluded gardens reflected it.
There were pale, creamy-green hydrangeas bushes with an echoing green of key lime plants circling it, and just an endless gathering of scented foliage, bold as well as delicate, and blooms at every eye level. At the heart of the garden, a running fountain of water replaced a chemical filled swimming pool that was there when Jane moved in. Walking through these gardens I felt transported, really transported, to somewhere else, somewhere protected and cocooned, colorful and growing . . . even healing.
Jane leaned over a crimson-fuschia rose and asked me, How are you on literature? I told her I had enjoyed reading the classics. She said she majored in literature but then pursued a career as a therapist. Anyway, she asked, had I heard of Tess of The DUbervilles by Thomas Hardy? Why yes! I had not read this book, but back in the day I had liked Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy.
This fuschia rose, Jane said as she pressed on its pink petals and they all came showering down into the palm of her hand, is a Tess.
It is named Tess of The DUbervilles. She then pressed the petals into my palm. I raised them to my nose and was captured and cloaked by the most intoxicating, lovely, flowering perfumed fragrance.
THERE was something I loved about this garden, something intangible that touched me maybe, in addition to the flowering beauty, all the paths. Over the years, Jane grew the gardens intentionally designing the space with many pathways and walkways.
I dont want to see the garden all at once, she said. It is kind of like life: If I had to see all my life, knew everything that will be, all at once, I couldnt go on I would just stop because I have had a lot of sadness . . .
Her voice trailed off with a faraway look in her eyes. But this way there is always another path in the garden, and I never know what will be around the bend . . . like this garden right here. And Jane turned right, with me, to another new garden. It is beautiful.
You see, when I am out here gardening, there is no pain.
No pain, Jane repeated.
OUR conversation, mine and Janes, began about flowers, but by now I saw Jane not only for the artist she was, but the gardener-healer that she was, too. If ever there were a garden with a soul, it was Janes.
I suppose, in a sense, we all carry our own gardens around with us. After all, that is where it all began, in a garden. The Garden of Eden.
And I suppose, too, sometimes in life we become that garden. We are that plant or flower sitting there minding our own business, just living, keeping an abundance of foliage with us, when, like the gardener cutting away at the weeds, life comes along and shears and prunes and cuts away. And it hurts. Oh, does it hurt. Left shaking in the wind, frail and exposed . . . until the new shoots it made room for begin to take root and grow.
There is water and sunshine and light whatever that may be in your life to nurture the plant you or me.
And there are those pathways. Those labyrinths of possibilities, the never ending paths and turns branching out in different directions, every now and then meeting at the fork in the road of where the past and the present meet and touch. Like Rosh Hashanah. That time when our past year and future year, ever so briefly, for two days, meet and kiss. We will bid adieu to the irrevocably existing year that we lived and is now behind us, before we greet the future one that is stretched before us.
Reader, may you find only paths of beauty and sweetness this year, when you round the bend.
Shana tova umetukah to you and yours, and may you and the whole House of Israel be inscribed in the book of life.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
