Stirring Up the Gardener’s Imagination



The other day I was asked what my favorite gardening websites are and why. The first one that popped into my mind was Gardening Gone Wild http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=9088 because of its pieces on photography and design, the ability to interact and cross-blog, and the hosts’ ability to generally stir up the imagination of gardeners everywhere.

So this post is an entry in GGW’s Picture This Contest for November, aptly named End of the Line. My interpretation is a literal one (top photo) – a winter scene of our cedar arbor at the end of the line formed by a decorative fence that marks the boundary (or end of the line) between where we actively garden and the next, semi-wild zone.

But there’s more. There are the horizontal lines of the arbor itself. And the upright lines of the tree trunks and the tips of the fence pickets. The sentry-like vertical forms of the snow-covered rhododendrons. And finally, the curving line of the wild grapevine.

Once I started looking for an appropriate image, I saw lines everywhere in the garden. The second photo, taken the same day, shows the angular lines of the Adirondack chairs, swing, and deck chair; the horizontal lines of my potting table, and more rhododendron sentries and tree trunks.

Everywhere I looked in the garden, I started to see lines, lines, and more lines – the puffball of white at the end of the curved line of a spent anemone; the electric and phone lines cutting through the woods from the road to my house; the flowing lines of my Kwan-Yin statue’s robe; the spiky lines of lavender plants, etc. These are all things I look at every day, but had not seen – at least not with the eye of a photographer.

A good blog should stir up gardeners’ imagination. I hope this one does that for you.

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