I take a tour of the garden, noting what has started its new season, what needs to be removed. There is a side of gardening that many don't discuss, but it is as necessary to the process of growth as anything.
There is a certain amount of natural violence in a garden. Today I noticed the hyacinths pushing back clods of dirt, defying the Oklahoma clay for its showing of brilliant magenta. The clay looks crumpled, defeated in light of this victory. The strength of that hyacinth is wonderous to me.
What started as an ugly bulb now parades in my border as some lady of the evening, bright and lustrous, tempting me with her scent and her color. The clay has been defeated for this beauty.
The brush that I cleared away was once a part of this parade, its time now spent, it now gives itself to the soil as food and organic material. Death, life and then death.
"A great many people will live out their days without ever seeing such sights, or if they do, never grasping." Barbara Kingsolver
There is a certainty to this garden that I cannot deny. It's beauty is there but its effort is also there. It's ability to transform itself each season from a lifeless track of twigs and brittle seeds is nothing short of miraculous. But a beautiful violence allows it to be so.
What of this effort that allows new things to begin? What does this say to life? What does it say about God, indeed does it say anything?
Or am I just another spring romantic in love with the wonders of Spring?
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