For the first time in many years I have made gardens — lots of gardens. Vegetables and flowers, shrubs and trees, perennials and annuals, yellow and blue, old favorites and plants I’ve never seen before. Every day I watch the unfoldment. What is taller this morning? What is thriving, what is fading away? The lilies alone are enough to generate songs of rapture as they burst open, more blooms each day with colors unexpected and vivid. The butterfly bush has lost all semblance of decorum, jutting out new branches at 90 degree angles to the ground. That new kind of alium I planted — at the last possible moment last November before everything froze — is now a cosmological wonder, even more stunning now that all the blooms have faded and only the fantastic delicate spherical structure of the thing remains. Oh! For a ride in that alium space ship!
Every day a new development; even the young tomato plants are starting to form fruit. My imagination is carried away by thoughts of the tiny zucchini plants and how, in their maturity, they will attempt to take over the entire back yard.
Watching the wildness of nature — even those developments that are predictable are still completely filled with a kind of wild primal surge — I feel the freedom and joy of being alive.
