My backyard is small. Maybe 30 feet by 40 feet. But I’ve been working in it for over 20 years, and I know every plant intimately. I’ve shaped them and fed them and watered them and pruned them and planted them and transplanted them. They are an intimate expression of my living aesthetic.
My landscape is a work of my creative being. It changes colors and configurations so that there is something for every season. I will sit on my back deck and just stare at my garden like a meditation object. I will spend hours cleaning up debris and picking out the dead leaves. We just had our house painted and a lot of paint chips got into my lawn, and I’ve been spending an hour or so in evenings picking out the chips for both aesthetic and health reasons.
It is cherry season, and the giant wild cherry in my neighbor’s yard is raining down tiny black fruit on my garden. In contrast, my own ornamental cherry is raining down hard, tiny green cherries—with the difference being my tiny cherries are twice as tiny as my neighbors, which are twice as tiny as a cherry you might find in the store.
I’ve got staghorn ferns and tiger lilies from New England. Peonies and yellow grasses from other parts of my garden, a surviving rhododendron and azeleas from before I moved in.
I could go on an on, I’m sure. I could describe the lawn, and the wide variety of grasses in it, and how I weed it by hand. I could describe my compost, and how it sits beneath my deck and how I rake it around to turn it over and what kinds of materials go in it. Or shouldn’t go in it.
But this is about appreciation. I think anyone must understand intuitively that if you put a lot of work and time into something, you have to appreciate it a great deal. Otherwise why would you spend the time and effort on it? I appreciate it because I know it and I know it so well, and I have gardened it, and I have slowly transformed it, over the years, into something that pleases my eye.
My aesthetic is about naturalness and curves. It is about giving the eye everywhere something to look at, but nowhere to find something harsh and manufactured. A couple of years ago, my back neighbor put in a huge, ugly cyclone fence that totally mangled the look. I mean, it was as bad as if someone put in a toxic waste dump in my back yard.
But eventually some materials came to hand. I needed to prune a tree, and I realized that if I wove the branches through the cyclone fence, I could hide the big ugly pipes behind something that looked more natural—indeed—it looks like a grape arbor. Now I need to get something to grow on the wood and fence, and perhaps wisteria will do the trick.
There is a major problem, but I don’t know what to do about it: mosquitoes. The mosquitoes in my back yard are quite vicious, although they seem to like shins and forearms. Worse, I am allergic to their bites. My skin is a rash of welts where those mosquitoes bit me—welts that do not grow when I get bitten by mosquitoes in other parts of the world.
But even that I appreciate. They are living creatures going about their business. They are very clever. They might even bring dengue fever or other horrible diseases. I don’t know what I mean when I say I appreciate them, because I don’t like them. But I guess I appreciate that they fight to exist and are always so busy and have such a big impact. Alas.
Composing members:
0
