Life and Death in the Garden
Yes, the garden. The garden as a metaphor for life and death anywhere, everywhere. Where else but the garden through which to view the renewal of life, the advent of death's ascent? The seasons descend one after the other bringing us renewal, causing us to lament the end of yet another year's adventure in rebirth. What could be more fundamental to our own lives on this earth than the yearly advent of spring and rebirth; autumn and sad preparation; winter and the death of vegetation.This very same vegetation upon which we have always relied to maintain our own slender and tenuous hold on life. From the time of the first humans to surface upon the earth and who sought their sustenance through the vegetation which surrounded them, to the hunter-gatherer societies, to the establishment of farming communities and the constant recognition of life-sustaining crops in the history of mankind?
In today's world we maintain this connection in a far less direct way. We no longer need to grow our own crops to sustain ourselves. We can thank the evolution of farming communities, the great conglomerate farming enterprises who grow crops and export them world-wide in an ever-diminishing need to depend on local crops. Farming techniques have changed, greater production can be achieved with new advances in farming, and the resulting foodstuffs shipped to further and greater locations than ever before.
As for us, we still celebrate Nature and her abundance in our own way, to fulfill our own individual needs, by gardening in very small areas where we live. Our gardens continue to give us pleasure, to surprise and enlighten us, to remind us of what nature herself means to us in her great diversity and sometimes-crotchety behaviours. We too celebrate the seasons' needs and messages. Another year gone. With it the other denizens of our gardens, the butterflies, the songbirds.
We see and experience the loss of warmth in the atmosphere, the fewer days of light, the lessening of sunlight, the greater events of rain and wind and cold interrupting our too-brief and glorious summer. The gardens are put to rest. Perennials cut back to wait out their renewal time come spring. The tender annuals are ruthlessly taken from the soil, rather than permitting them to die in the cold. We take in our lawn furniture; our gardening tools are set aside for another winter to pass.
And while we clean things up and tuck them away in holding areas for the duration of the winter, we discover verities which hadn't occurred previously. Ardent gardeners, always looking for new ornamentation in their outside living areas were recently reminded of the wonderful effects that could be had in the garden through reflection and added light, of placing mirrors in their gardens.
None other than Marjorie Harris, the Canadian gardening guru, author of many books on gardening, editor of a Canadian gardening magazine of some note, did a feature last year of the renewal of her own downtown Toronto garden where she brought in landscapers whose first step was to frame a portion of her garden entirely in large mirrors. Ms. Harris admitted it took some work to get herself accustomed to seeing her "getting-older" visage in those mirrors, but she thought she would really get to love this new look.
We took in a large square mirror from our backyard today, to store it downstairs in the basement over winter. And then concluded, from the sad evidence before us that we would never again place a mirror in our garden. For into this mirror had flown a junco, its tiny back broken by the impact of its body against the hard glass of the mirror. And although we hadn't realized it at the time of earlier discovery, this was not the first casualty we experienced because of this truly stupid garden decoration.
All that looks attractive is not necessarily what it is made out to be. We should take more careful measurement of our attraction to unnatural products in natural settings.
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 15, 2006
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