Tending

My nature experience for yesterday was gardening, though I have to call it more tending, because it was weeding and training. I was working with Nature, but not really experiencing beauty. Or so I thought. It didn't feel like beauty because everywhere I looked all I could think of was what work I had to do. Then I stopped using my visual sense and concentrated on the smells and the sounds, and that was beautiful. In that frame of mind, the buds and the fact that everything just comes alive had it's own beauty.

Reading Emerson's Nature essay this morning, one of the many points I came away thinking about was that the beauty of Nature is always a promise, it's pending it's in the future. I don't know if that's always true, but it certainly is of early spring gardening. The appreciation and anticipation of a bud is more beautiful because it contains the idea of what it will be in the future.

I have a climbing rose and a climbing clematis that I've been training for years. They are spectacular when they bloom, but I find them beautiful all year round. They're like friends that always deliver, and appreciate attention. You have to train the vines right now though, or they get out of hand. I've pushed the rose to climb up one trellis over a pair of windows and down another. It's now going to bloom across the whole window. I love it! And both of those plants are at least 20 years old, if not 30. The clematis was over by the rose, but no one could see it and it didn't get enough sun, so I moved it to the side of the house over another window, maybe 12-13 years ago, and it is spectacular. Both plants grow on their old wood and use the trellis and the dead wood to be even more spectacular. They have a slow and steady rhythm to their existence. I've been using the word 'cadence' for rhythm, because it seems like a better word for Nature, but these plants have rhythm. They are a waltz. One is a blue waltz and the other is red, both to the purple side of their hues.

So in addition to the stick world (there were seagulls on it yesterday morning and turtles at night) I'd like to post photos of the bloom cycle of my rose and clematis. The photos here are in the early stages. Everything is stick like, but you can tell they're alive. I'm also including the apple tree, because you can see that bloom almost by the minute once it starts and it is spectacular too.