Acts of Garden Creativeness

Acts of Garden Creativeness

 'Waste' that is Decorative

At present I’m often reluctantly pruning in my garden, reluctantly as the long lengths of sappy growth are often topped with beautiful flowers. This is because we are still getting later showers and with the warm weather everything growing thinks they are in tropical climes. Of course I do not want to throw out these flowers and so they go into glass vases dotted around the house. 

A Bunch of Spring Flowers

Autumn Colours

'Waste' that is Useful

Many times things from the garden that you might put on the compost heap, or into the green rubbish bin, can be put to some use. There were the sappy twigs I bound into a wreath for Christmas, the longer stronger lengths I use as posts to hold up the tomato plants, or the fallen cones that make a beautiful, and long lasting, indoor decoration.

 

A walk through the country can produce as many interesting ‘found’ objects or a bunch of wild flowers.

 

More on Trees

I have always found that gardening, like walking, sorts out my puzzled thinking processes. It is calming and connects you to the larger world. Imagine the joy of being connected, via an appreciation of trees, to a life that was there before you existed and will be there long after you leave this world. This thought is one that certainly puts things into perspective!

 

An Act of Garden Vandalism

This week I read an article in our local paper that horrified me. We have of course been horrified by many happenings in the world, and this might seem a small instance of terrorism, but to ringbark an old and historic tree is an act that horrified me with its senseless, and selfish human-centric view of life. Was it because someone thought, ‘I want a view’? or just because someone felt angry at the world?

The article by Jeff Sparrow in www.thegardian.com tells about an act of violence that happened in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.

 ‘The Separation Tree, Melbourne’s huge and ancient river red gum, took its name from the impromptu celebration held when Governor Latrobe declared Victoria separate from the colony of New South Wales. Now we’ve killed it. Well done, humans.

As Tim Entwistle from the Royal Botanical Garden explains, the tree actually predates the white settlement of Melbourne itself. It would, he says, “have been a sapling in the 17th century, when the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung met and camped beside the Yarra River.”

Now it’s dying, after two separate ringbarking attempts by vandals, who also targeted collections of other plants.’ 

Jeff Sparrow goes on to discuss other large-scale catastrophes, such as the loss of trees in the Amazon jungle, and the manner in which populations of wild creatures have dropped in the last four years. These are catastrophes I can read about and worry about but for me that one tree, lost because of the senseless act of perhaps one person, leaves me shaking my head with extreme sadness at the way we often cannot think beyond our own needs and angers.

Finding Our Own Creativeness

Brief Beauty in the Garden

Not for Picking - Just for Admiration

Much better, I think, to realize we are not the ‘lords of creation’, rather that we are privileged to be able to join in with nature’s yearly creativeness. If we do this, in our gardens, and parks (while of course keeping a wary eye open for nature’s fickleness, such as flood and fires), we have opportunities to find our own creativeness, and opportunities to settle back into our place in the world again.

Nature's Bounties