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By Big Jim Bristow
 A gardener is very much an artist but with a very important difference. The gardener does not work with paint and brush to fill an empty canvas with color. While a painting has its own distinctive beauty and appeal, the gardener's canvas offers the special richness of beauty against a background of life in nature. The gardener works with fertile earth, with seed, sky, sun, rain and nature to create a living experience that gives joy that goes far beyond a lifeless painting. A garden follows the natural course of life itself. It's born, it matures, it flourishes with a blaze of floral beauty and as in life's final season it fades like a melting sunset into memory.
With the coming of each new season, the gardener tends with loving care to each perennial and new floral blossom. Seeds are placed into the soil just waiting to nourish their growth. Fragile cuttings are carefully transplanted with the gardener's gentle and loving touch. The job of the gardener does not end, as in a painting with the final stoke of a brush on canvas. The loving care for each and every flower and plant will continue through the entire life cycle of the precious garden. A garden will thrive in direct relation to the love and dedication that the gardener is prepared to devote to her or to his floral, creative expression.
There are few things on our incredible planet, that are as delicate and as intricate as a flower. Every flower has its own unique charm and loveliness. It reaches out with its petals to embrace the life giving elements of nature which when combined with the creative hands of the gardener will flourish and grow to its full potential. A flower's stem will hold the blossom just where it needs to be to get the warmth and light of the sun. In the garden, a rich profusion of color bursts forth to reflect the work, love and creative care of the gardener.
Each flower has its own story to tell, its own unique history and highly distinctive contribution to the garden of which it is a vital part. A garden works in harmony with nature. Each flower is sought out by many kinds of visitors. A broad variety of species who come not only for the beauty but for the precious, life giving fruits of the plant, like bees, humming birds, creatures that follow an instinctive association with the magical world of plants and flowers in the constant search for their own survival.
A garden is the ultimate joining of the souls of nature and the human spirit in an effort to create a brilliant blend of floral color in a virtual sea of majestic shades and textures. In a garden, we see a variety of designs created with a sense of perfection known only to nature. There is no limit to size, to color or to shape. The garden is a living canvas on which the gardener can create a perfect floral and plant expression of the vision they see of nature's wonder.
There is no greater gesture of respect and admiration for nature and the majestic settings that nature can make possible than the gardener working in close harmony with the good earth. The wonderfully creative hands of the gardener and the heart and scope of nature to create inspirational beauty is a powerful force. Together, they open a door to a unique sense of beauty brought forth from the earth and made special by the gardener's close, personal touch. Every garden is a direct reflection of the inner qualities of the gardener who creates it. In "Barbara's Garden" I see a wonderful abundance of gentility, creativeness, patience and love, dedication and a deep respect for all things natural. Above all else, I see a boundless generosity and reflection of a great, inner sense of peace. In "Barbara's Garden" - pace is replaced with pleasure, anxiety with relaxation and comfort and the ordinary with the exceptional. Each year, "Barbara's Garden", lavished with her love and affection for nature becomes more beautiful. New additions mingle with old favorites to enhance the variety of Barbara's floral treasure chest. Rarely a day goes by that her loving care and attention is not freely given to her close relationship with nature and the garden that is so much her own very special place. With each new season, "Barbara's Garden" welcomes the beauty of new floral faces. The effort she gives so lovingly to her special place is not seen as work but as a simple exchange of love for beauty, the kind of visual charm that is nature's reward for the dedication that a gardener gives to the good earth. I know that all I have written is true because Barbara is my loving wife, my partner and my best friend. The wonder she creates each year in her special garden is a world that she shares with me and with all the others who know and love her. "Barbara's Garden" is a treasure indeed, just like the person who spares no effort to create it each time the new buds of spring mark the arrival of yet another season to plant and grow wonderful things from the earth. |
