Whenever I feel like I have lost my way, I go to my garden. There I will find everything: beauty, growth, life-and-death fighting, and rot. I should say that I go to my garden every day whether or not I have lost my way. I am always astonished by the beauty and intelligence of what I find there, and inspired to consider what poem or art might come to being that opens up a conversation with what I’m seeing. Here, for example, is a clematis flower from my garden. I’m taken by the vibrant shades of lavender/violet streaked through its petals and wondering if I might be able to dye some fabric that honors those colors. I love the star-like shape of the flower and enjoy the irony of its placement on the very floor of the garden. I hadn’t meant to take a photo of an assassin bug, but here it is, watching out, I imagine, for aphids and other destructive insects. I wonder if its tumeric-colored body has a meaning in the world of insects, and if I might create a piece that mingles his color with that of the flower. Beauty and terror together.
And what are we to make of the bitter ginger flower (also known as shampoo ginger)?
Today I will harvest the flower, and wash my hair with its juices. I love the cone shape of the flower and even the rough edges where some of the petals have fallen off. How to evoke ginger in a poem or piece of art?
I have several shades of hibiscus in my yard that never fail to bring me joy, though the flowers only last a day.
I did make a small art quilt inspired by a hibiscus a few years ago:
Still thinking about how to respond to this sexy banana flower.
This plumbago I planted in honor of my mother, who had a giant one growing in front of her house as long as I can remember:
The color is similar to the washed blue/lavender color of the hydrangea she also grew and which I am struggling to grow. She wrote in her journals how she loved Rilke’s poem inspired by the hydrangea.
Blue Hydrangea
Just as the remnant green in tinted pot
So are these leaves, now rough and wrecked
Behind the flower umbels, that reflect
Only a hue of blue, more do they not.
Reflected are they, tear-stained, imperfect,
As if this they were prone to cease,
And as in blue and aged paper leaves
ThereĀ“s yellow within, grey and violet.
Faded like a washed-out pinafore
No longer worn and of so little use:
How do we our too-short life endure.
But suddenly a blue renewed is seen
Among one of the umbels, and I sense
A blue delighted, smiling at the green.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Tr. Jack Lohrmann
I made a quilt in honor of the hydrangea my mother loved and that I struggled to grow a few years before she died, thinking about how her dementia might have fractured her seeing of it.
