There was a time in my life when fashion mattered. As a buyer for a big department store chain, I traveled all over the world to find fashion trends and interpret them for a public voracious for what was "new". I was part of a team of "product development specialists" who laid out hundreds of samples on the surfaces of every table, chair and carpet in hotel rooms in Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong to glean the right bells and whistles (line, texture, form, color) that would attract our collective clients and patrons to plunk down millions and millions of dollars to possess them. We went to the Paris shows, the Milan shows, and the street scene in Harijuku to fill ourselves with ideas that we could sell for $99.99 in the after Christmas sale.
I didn't know then what I know now: everything we called the creative process, was an ongoing need to understand the natural world, somehow, in our strange world of artifice.
Perhaps a large margin of what any artist does is labor to connect one's self to the world in which we exist. I have always been clear that all art is autobiographical...what else can it be? Perhaps this is all any human being yearns for...to reconnect to nature. It is easy here to understand the principle of biophilia as E.O.Wilson presents it.
This is the essence of what gardening is for me. Connecting my "self", all that I am, back to the earth and Her gifts. That aforementioned quartet of "line, texture, form and color" are for me guideposts on this journey. Include smell and taste, and these simple sensory markers are in place. These concepts link me tangibly to Her.
Scroll at light speed through the ages of man and consider humanity's efforts to reconnect with nature through the artificial environments he creates and calls gardens. Thumb through beautiful picture books filled with artful paintings and photographs of our idealized concepts of nature. Listen to the scholars expound on the first gardens: the interpreting of nature by her creatures. In our contemporary world, we can grab how-to books to recreate Persian gardens, Roman gardens, Italian gardens, English gardens, French gardens, Chinese gardens, Japanese gardens, Pacific Northwest gardens, Southwest gardens, woodland, desert and seaside gardens, and any other permutation man has devised. And yet, what garden can evoke nature so utterly than observing nature herself? Our audacity comes from our naiveté. We think we are the center of the universe. That most often unconscious position is both our solace and our demise. We survive by being the "fittest" as Darwin would tell us, yet because we underestimate the awesome powers of our natural world, we sometimes stand in Her path at extremely inopportune times. We tend to call them "devastating natural disasters"... or just "zonal denial"...
But enough of the philosophy for now, and back to the garden.
I'm creeping towards a personal goal here I'll call the Timeless Garden. As a "product development specialist", it was my job to come up with the newest fashion trend. Those trends, however, had to connect in some way to what was known...tangible clues to the familiar. As a gardener, it is my quest to develop a garden that acknowledges the fashions and trends of our race's efforts to translate Nature (often quite elegantly), and embrace them in such a way that I (this is a personal thing, after all) am transported to my own niche in this cosmos...suspended in a place that embraces as much as my spirit can contain.
