Sunday Song: Gardens

Right now, if all has gone according to plan, I should be in a quite beautiful place with one of the most beautiful people I know. And I’ve seen and heard some beautiful things already this week. Got me thinking about gardens, actually.

I know I’ve posted a lot of Secret Garden before, but what can be more appropriate for garden photos?

Right. Get that playing, and let’s have a wander through the gardens at Brown’s Point Lighthouse, shall we?

Browns Point Heritage Garden I

So it seems “Keeper Brown also… maintained a flower garden featuring daffodils, tulips, peonies, and roses.” We’ve definitely got tulips.

Browns Point Heritage Garden II

The Dash Point Garden club planted and maintains the Heritage Garden now. Here’s a bit about it:

Oscar and Annie The two gardens in front of the house are named in honor of the first lighthouse keepers, Oscar and Annie Brown. Oscar’s log of their 30 years at the lighthouse includes descriptions of the various plants the couple cultivated. Mavis Stears, curator of the Points Northeast Historical Society, combed through the log and compiled a list of plants that Dash Point Garden Club members try to incorporate in the gardens.

Oscar’s Garden includes several types of hebe, mahonia, roses, bleeding heart, foxglove and columbine. Annie’s Garden includes peonies, lavender, hardy fuchsia and a couple of trees to represent the apple orchard she once tended.

I don’t usually go gaga for gardens – I like stuff growing wild – but these were truly beautiful. Especially the bit with the bleeding heart.

Browns

Wandering through there, I’m reminded that gardens are quite lovely. There was an English garden in front of one of the old Victorian houses in Prescott, Arizona that I always slowed down to view on the way by. Serene and lovely. I determined right then and there I’d have an English garden if I ever had a garden at all, but that was before I discovered Zen.

Browns Point Heritage Garden IV

Japanese gardens in general are my cup of green tea these days. I like how they evoke the natural world while being something more. Pure art, those. I find a serenity there I find in no other garden. But the gardens here evoked another kind of tranquility, and moreover didn’t try to regiment the plants like so many gardens seem to do. A little order, coaxed rather than imposed, and juxtapositions of form and color that draws one in.

Browns Point Heritage Garden V

When I am an old woman, I hope I shall have gardens. I like getting my hands down into the good earth. I like giving things room to grow, and watching them flourish. It’s just too bad I have a black thumb. Perhaps by the time I’m older, I shall be wiser in the ways of green growing things with brilliant blooms. If not, I’ll cultivate rocks. That I can do. And I’m apparently quite good at moss, judging from the carpets of it growing where my fuchsia plants lived their brief lives. I can’t claim much credit there. Moss round here will grow anywhere you don’t make a determined effort to kill it. I’ve even got some growing happily on the bare deck. I’ve left it alone. I find moss lovely and fascinating, and it’s soft and springy, and it was rare where I grew up. I could do a moss garden. Moss, and rocks, and patterns raked in gravel, and perhaps, if I’m very lucky, a flower or two: that will be my garden, when I grow old.

What is yours?

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Sunday Song: Gardens
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