For
years, when I was being honest with myself, I thought that my adherence to this
approach was due to either laziness, a complete lack of imagination, or a
misguided notion of the ability of nature to police itself – rather than to
a painstakingly thought out, carefully nuanced, socio-floriculture
philosophy. But now I realize that I actually
am practicing a highfalutin, well respected and ancient form of landscape
artistry.
I
am a sculptor of gardens.
Now,
I have heard the following apocryphal story two different ways – both of which
follow.
The
first version concerns the brilliant Renaissance artist Michelangelo, who is
asked about the difficulties that encountered in sculpting his masterpiece depicting
the Biblical hero and slayer of Goliath.
He
replies, “It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like
David.”
A
similar anecdote concerns an unnamed artist and his statue of a pachyderm. His
response is, “Get the biggest granite block you can find and just remove
everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”
And
I immediately realized, “That’s exactly what I’ve been doing in my yard for the
past thirty years” – except that instead of the biggest granite block I have
been chipping away at the chockablock array of flowers that I have allowed to
live in our garden spaces, and that while both “Mikey A” and that unknown
sculptor probably had a pretty good idea in their minds of what their finished
product would look like, I usually don’t.
So
wandering around our yard after Mars and I returned from our annual Penn State
University Golf Camp junket where during our down time we visited the
university’s magnificent Arboretum, I decided that a couple of our perennial
beds were way too over crowded – and became inspired to lop off all of those
flowers that were preventing the patch from actually being a garden.
But
where to start? With Michelangelo’s famous
statue obviously weighing heavily on my subconscious I quickly decided to
remove two of the three teasel plants that had staked claim to a chunk of space
in the midst of our Gooseneck Loosestrife, Asters, Sedum, Chives, and Maximilian
Sunflowers. This left one tall prickly plant
with spiny purple flower-heads sticking up as the main feature in that part of
the plot – like the most prominent (and most secretly photographed) frontal
feature on the nude statue of David. I
was getting quite excited – by the work ahead of me. The rest was going to be easy.
Following
my basic rule of “no interspecies intermingling” I painstakingly (sort of)
uprooted the stalks of any leaves that looked different than those that
surrounded them. As well as eliminate any
plant too weak to stand upright under its own power. Then a heavy rain came and helped the project
by breaking the stems of others.
After
two days of labor my trash pail became filled and the work of art was put on
hold pending our weekly visit from Paine’s Rubbish Removal.
But
the good part is that, as seen from the air from our backyard drone, even in
its incomplete state the resulting pattern of pushy perennials looks somewhat
like a six-cubits-and-a-span-tall, giant Philistine warrior lying prostrate in
the weeds, with a large bump on his forehead where the divinely guided slingshot
stone brought him down. And, in my
future work, if I feel the area still looks too crowded, I can always add a
little more Biblical realism by lopping off his head just as David did, and using
it to begin yet another garden. The
victorious Israelites did something similar by displaying the decapitated
trophy more or less as a lawn ornament – sort of an Old Testament Yard Gnome.
This
is so much more fun than actually knowing what you are doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment