and so it begins

There’s an old fam­ily photo that I think about every now and then. My sis­ter and I are seated at a view­point over­look­ing the lower falls on the Yel­low­stone River. My sis­ter is star­ing into the cam­era and at my mother who took all these early fam­ily pic­tures. And next to her is me, star­ing not at the cam­era but over the rail­ing at some­thing off to the side, not the main attrac­tion of the falls, but some­thing else–maybe the gorge, maybe the river, maybe the clouds and sky and weather. Lost in the landscape.

For me gar­dens can be won­der­ful lit­tle memen­tos of the larger land­scape. Sur­round me with inter­est­ing plants and their inter­est­ing col­ors and tex­tures, and you’ll stand a chance of los­ing me in it. But I’m also inter­ested that these patches and pots of earth are totally faked ver­sions of what lies beyond the gar­den gates and city walls. There’s always a human hand in the gar­den, and I’m inter­ested in what the gar­den reveals about the per­son plan­ning, plant­ing and tend­ing the garden.

And I have lots of other inter­ests that I expect will end up here–art, pho­tog­ra­phy, design, music, pol­i­tics, sci­ence, stuff in the news–and so I expect these notes will ram­ble a bit, some­thing like an old Lady Banks rose grow­ing in many direc­tions from its root­stock. Since the ram­bles and bram­bles grow from the same root­stock, though, I expect they’ll have some­thing in common.

I guess all that’s a bit of a man­i­festo. I don’t want to lay down too many rules, though, because the world is such an inter­est­ing place, even if that world is a small patch of gar­den with herbs for the kitchen or a tiny re-creation of the cos­mos in a flow­er­pot on someone’s apart­ment windowsill.

And so, off we go!

November 24 2007 | Categories: art • everything • gardening • landscape • landscape design • rambles | Tags: • • • | No Comments »