Saturday, February 11, 2006
The Random Gardener
This last gardening year, I showed quite a number of pictures of individual plants, and talked about how they fit into our wooded garden. After a while I started getting requests for pictures that showed the overall garden, and finally cobbled together a visual garden tour, which really mainly showed the garden paths more than the beds, explaining that it was hard to show any sense of the overall garden in a small picture, as the flowers are embedded in a woods, with pathways that meander around, precluding any impressive distant shots; I do very much like the garden walk as one of discovery. But I also have a dirty little gardening secret: I am a terrible landscaper, largely devoid of whatever talent it is that allows people to stand back and visualize the beauty that will result in combining plants, and lacking in the patience that it would take to accomplish a pleasing effect. Once in a while, even in my garden, on a modest scale as shown in these pictures, plants come together nicely, but that's a tribute to nature's beauty and forgivness rather than anything I did, for I am a plant collector; an accumulator... I am my uncle Hank.... he started out as a stamp collector, branched out into collecting beer cans, and then became a hoarder. By the time he died, his house had little pathways through the rooms between the piles of stuff. Now if you'll forgive me, I have some spring plant catalogues to go look through. 
// posted by IBOY @ 6:49 AM 
