An Iowa Garden: The Garden In The Gloaming

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

The Garden In The Gloaming

I envy the British; they have such great words to describe so many things in nature... now I know we supposedly share the same language, but they've kept a lot of good words to themselves, like "gloaming", which really just means the time of day we call twilight, but gloaming is so much more romantic and mysterious. It captures the mood of that quiet time after the sun sinks behind our west ridge; when the birds in the high black cherry trees cast forth their last sweet songs, and the pond below us falls into the shadows.
In the fading light, eight foot tall azalea July Jewel lights up as if it was covered by glowing coals, its sweet and spicy scent ravishing in the coolness at the end of a long summer day. It is the gloaming.