Waco Creek Journal: No rational grounds for it

We love our yearly grandparent photo. This year at the Dallas Arboretum.

The rain held off for my birthday trip to the Dallas Arboretum with the whole family. I love that my birthday falls during spring break--anything we do feels like we are celebrating. What a beautiful world they've created at the Arboretum. It's big enough that when you visit just a few times a year it feels like a world without end--always something new to see.

Almost every semester I read a story with my students called "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield. Walking through the Dallas Arboretum, I always think of the opening of the story--here's an excerpt from a few lines into the story:

"As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels."

Trying to take a pic at the end of the day--forced smiles anyone?

It's quite sad to think of it this way, really: to think of a garden as artificial, an illusion made to impress or to flatter the intelligence. Not to malign the story--it portrays a delicious irony between the world of wealth and beauty the family carefully tends for itself and the dismal realities of other people's lives right outside their door. And there certainly may be an element of this in the massive expense of maintaining of an arboretum (in full bloom in early March?) in the middle of a city. But those ironic opening lines of "The Garden Party" do not really capture how I experience the beauty of a garden.

I thought about the arboretum again this week when I got to the end of a wonderful novel called "The Goldfinch" (won the Pulitzer prize a few years ago--I'm quite behind). The main character is talking about paintings, about "those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find” (759).

That's much more like it: the power of an artfully made image (or garden) to connect to our hearts, to renew us, to remind us of our deepest longings. The power of beauty to change the way we see and think and feel.

a poppy blooming in our yard

Making our yard beautiful

And so we tend our own gardens--our own little patches of beauty. Making little paintings of the garden has been my way of tending to beauty, I suppose. I'm a more whole person when I'm somewhere in that creative process.

For JB, it's the process of envisioning and creating the actual garden and cultivating it from year to year. Our yard is a demonstration plot in some ways. How can we take full advantage of the unique soil and conditions of our native Texas landscape and make it the most beautiful and sustainable thing it can be?

Playing in a friend's garden

And for the children, "Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean—mending old things, preserving them, looking after them—on some level there’s no rational grounds for it—“ (757). There doesn't seem to be much rational ground for a fairy garden like this either, but it sure captures Eliza's imagination. And it was a satisfying project for JB's creative energies too.