Tag: garden

Garden of Art

After we retired, my husband and I discovered that we loved art.  Each piece that we added to our walls added a new dimension of beauty to our lives.

I am attracted to beauty – the beauty of Carmelite spirituality, the inner beauty of the people I love, the beauty of nature and the garden, and last but not least, the beauty of art.  Everything beautiful reminds me of God.  Pictured above are a few of my favorites: “Blue Tutus” by Eric Wallis, “After the Mass” by Chuck Mardosz, “Embudo Bounty” by James Trigg, and “Texas Tapestry” by Eric Michaels.

The Humble Petunia

Although I love to look at pictures of exotic gardens with unusual plants, my own garden is a humble garden. I am content with geraniums, nasturtiums, lobelia, and of course, the humble petunia. The one pictured above is a survivor. I planted it last year, and it survived the winter down to 18° F. It didn’t grow during the cold season, but it remained green, and as soon as spring came, it grew so tall and blossomed so abundantly that it became top heavy and I had to cut it back almost to the ground. Undeterred, it is growing again, promising to be as prolific as ever. It reminds me of a quote by St. Therese of Lisieux: “The brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy….If all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enameled with lovely hues….” (From The Story of a Soul)

Friendly Garden

It’s always a pleasure to wander through someone else’s garden. I love the wilderness flavor of this one, which was created by some neighbors who have become good friends. Their garden has a whimsical quality to it, a sort of ordered chaos. Walking through their garden gives me a whole new understanding of my friends. There is deep, abiding creativity here.