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Planting Our Creative Garden
By Sandra Lee Schubert | May 27, 2008
Spring to me is the perfect time to make plans and set goals. The air begins to vibrate, as everything starts to wake up. The birds are a bit perkier and lunchtime is for walking outside and not just huddling in warm offices. The ground has thawed enough for planting to begin. What we plant now will blossom and bear fruit in the summer and the fall. It is also the time to seed our creative gardens.
My grandmother’s garden took two forms. Her front lawn was well thought out, manicured and beautiful. A wayward dandelion knew not to rest in her grass. Flowers lined her house leading to the backyard. At first glance it mirrored the front lawn with well-placed bushes and trimmed grass. But to the back there was a line of demarcation. Behind the careful planning she gave her garden over to its natural desires. The garden was a riot of color and textures, a cornucopia of sensory pleasure. Wild flowers grew with abandon, trees linking with shrubs. Bees had their choice of nectar. My grandmother loved her perfect garden but relished her wild one, as did her grandchildren. We could walk through her wild garden and deeper into the woods where we reached a stream that we followed to all sorts of adventure. We literally entered into the creative world, wild, free and full of possibility.
The smells are what I recall. First the sweet scent of the flowers, the intoxication of the wilder flowers; then the sense of damp soil, rotted leaves that lined the stream and musky smell of moss that grew there too. The water ran clear along the stream giving off this cool air as we waded through it.
The structure and the wildness both fed our imagination. The scents still linger many years later. The garden planted then still feeds my creative imagination.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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