"All at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils." -William Wordsworth
Hyacinths, Narcissus, and other brave bulbs are sprouting through barely thawed soil to glorify their Creator. Spring is officially here and everything is looking grand!
"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine..."
From Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream
There is such wild beauty described by Oberon in Midsummer Night's Dream, I would love to create such an enchanted garden in my own suburban plot of God's earth. My garden would possess very wildness of this fairy glade, the tapestry of flowers and plants that give it it's magic. I am attracted to the disorder of the place, because sometimes it is the very disorder, abandoning my efforts to control, giving into that indolent luxuriance of allowing nature to do as it pleases sometimes, that usually gives something more beautiful than my own scheme can imagine.
What is more lovely and truly relaxing and refreshing, than the sight of a wild flower meadow, dazzling with brightest flashes of color against the contrasting richness of tall and swaying green grasses? The medieval idea of a perfect garden was 'a meadow starred with a thousand flowers.' When I look at the almost mathematically precise grids of some manmade gardens, the flowers standing to attention like soldiers, each sort of the same height, as though measured, everything arranged with the exactness of an obsessive compulsive, I am reminded of the world, striving, work, there is none of that relaxing and peaceful feeling of letting go, being part of nature as it enfolds us in it's luxuriant beauty, of abandoning ourselves to pleasure or dreams as we must to really enjoy.
I'm imagining cutting flowers, potted boxwoods, Fenway Park Boston ivy, fresh lettuce, herbs, tomatoes, jalapenos, wisteria, fruit trees and bushes, rose arbors, hydrangea,a bird bath garden, butterfly garden, fountain, grass and stepping stone paths. Oh where to begin????????
