New Year, New Perspectives

This time of year holds thrilling prospects...something must...to counterbalance the thought of another couple of months of cold dank weather here.   (One day I will fulfill my dream of finding a charming pied-à-terre somewhere sunny from December until the first daffodils...)

The idea of renewal, although  peaking, indeed, by the spring equinox March 20 this year, really begins for me as usual around January 1.  My grandma Leah's dictum is that whatever you do on New Year's Day, you will repeat throughout the year.  She was full of lovely superstitions, carried from her own childhood memories.  I am OK with that. This one urges me to plan days full of things I love to do.

This year, as a prelude, I spent New Year's eve on a walk-a-bout in Golden Gate Park with my son.  A walk through botanical gardens, museums and the Japanese Tea Garden was perfect.  The winter scene affords a view otherwise obscured by leaves and blooms.  I loved  the regimented phalanx of pollarded trees at the axis of the de Young, the tea garden, amphitheater and science museum. I was amused by the discovery of one of my favorite artists, Andy Goldsworthy's "crack" art form, called "Faultline", at the entrance to the de Young (easy to overlook even on this light foot traffic day).  The calming stillness of the bronze Buddha in the tea garden made me take sweet pause.  All statements of form and structure, huge or subtle, that truely influence the environments they are a part of.  I took away the realization that impact can be loud, or it can be subliminal.

The supports for the aging conifers over one of the pools in the Tea Garden gave me new appreciation for the meaning of "staking" a recumbent stem.

tree brace au naturel

A proper Zen garden, and the stunning placement of stones and raked gravel urges me to study closely what I seek to achieve in my own front courtyard.

Zen Garden, within the Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park

Later, a stroll though the Succulent, New Zealand and South African sections of the botanical garden, reminded me once again that the range of plants and their performance at different latitudes is a huge consideration, despite one's "wants" and obsessions.  I can have all the agaves and proteaceae I desire, but no matter how well coddled and protected, they will never achieve the glory they can without the approximation of their natural environment.  The winter flowering here (the summer for them in their homes) gives me only a glimpse of what these specimens look like in situ.  

Aloe in bloom, December 31, 2013

Some things I will try because I simply must fulfill my obsession to grow wonderfulness...after all, I do have avocado trees and baobab trees growing in my dining room right now.  Podocarpus henkelii is a new-to-me beauty that I am told will not survive our winters, yet I know that when I can find one, I will  buy it, and dream of the one I saw...