Sweet Air: Chanticleer and Shalom

Post 74
Ahhh, Chanticleer...

Enter the woods as ferns unroll,

And earth meets sky,

 

You'll roll down the hill as if you were five,

When lilacs crossed the sky.

Enlivened by color,

Peace enters in,

As though spores of pleasure

Blew in the wind.

What can you say

When all breathes Shalom,

Silent the bliss

That knows its way home.

It is hard to write prose about Chanticleer. Last Sunday I experienced the new woodland walk. It was as if I was on some favorite hike through a valley tween the Green Mountains, and all around me Nature was so happy, so fulfilled, so fully alive, that it felt as if it was coming alive in its heavenly aspect. Swathes of new foliage and wildflowers unrolled between the trees. The smells of this time of year, when the lilacs, ferns, lilies of he valley, and who knows what else, are so intensely in bloom that the air turns sweet to envelope consciousness. After about 20 minutes of this I started to feel such a peaceful, lively happiness that I could have blessed everything and everyone I have ever known.

Such moments do not last, probably are not meant to. But the garden is one of the best signs of them that I know.

A natural garden, if done well, is where the plants are happy, well-nourished, expressing themselves in all their fullness. It is as if they are singing as you walk, and you sing back. As if you sustain each other, nurture each other, enjoy each other, celebrate each other, making a reciprocal ecosystem.

And what is best is that when you get home to your own small plot, the beauty experienced at Chanticleer makes your own garden feel that much better. It enhances your sensitivity to the beauty  around you and the reciprocal relationships you experience.

Yes the world can still be a bad place. This is not a hallucination; it is an alternative. An alternative to cultivate and give thanks for.

Earthly Skysea Solstice,...and Jean Mather

 Post 43
I've literally been dreaming blue this last week--figures in glistening blue raiments. Its not hard to figure why. Outside my window, radiant pulsating blue...

Something about this last year, a rainy fall, a mild winter and an early spring, has made this one of the best years for hydrangeas anyone has seen. Hydrangea Heaven.

I did a post on hydrangeas last year that covers the basic how-to. but because it was a fall post, most of the pics were of aging moptops, not the lively blue youngins pictured so far. And besides, beautiful as these beauties are--there are also other types of hydrangeas, all with their own charms.

There are mopheads with bicolored florets.

 There are lacecaps.

There are lacecaps with variagated leaves.

 There are oak hydrangeas, happy in lightly dappled shade.

And then there are climbing hydrangeas and their crazy, ever-bloomin cousin, Schizophragma hydrangeoides. Here's a pic of a biggie at Chanticleer

Below is my yard with a 3 in 1, a climer, a bicolor, a lacecap... and a astilbe, a fig and cherub with a fish.

And all these are all in bloom right now. An earthly skysea show for the solstice.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

This post is in memory of the Rev. Dr. Jean Mather, Mother Jean, 09/23/1946- 06/13/2012.

She was a gentlewoman and a scholar, who set a stirring example of bravery and faith in the face of  adversity. It was an inspiration and a pleasure to have known her.

It almost seems silly to say 'Rest in Peace.' With people like Jean, you know they are in the arms of God. Nothing else could hold her. This felt surety when I think of her, and of others who I have known like her, is part of what fastens me to a faith in the Life beyond life.

Chanticleer, or Wonder at the Call of the Dawn

 Post 42

Is the wish to share wonder the first stirring of art?

To combine wildness and order, light and shade through love so that you can share the inklings and glimmers of infinity that fill you, and seem to overflow from you?

Welcome to Chanticleer.

Chanticleer  is an extraordinary pleasure garden on the Main Line.  Chanticleer is named after a rooster who shows up in Northern European folklore. a rooster like the one emblemed on top of this pool houses.

How do you communicate moments of wonder, when your senses seem to be taking in more than they can hold? Like at first light, when out of nowhere, emerges the rich complexity of reality.

Go to Chanticleer, walk around, maybe sit for a bit.

Such beautiful, expansive and witty public gardens, 'built solely for pleasure', are a blessing of this area. Within a few hours or less you can reach Chanticleer, Longwood Garden, Winterthur, Scott Arboretum , Morris Arboretum, Mt. Cuba , Wavehill, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens New York Botanical Garden and others. All of these are inspiration on many levels,

So, if you are lucky and willing, here are dawns, foretastes, or deep tastes, of what reality might be, or could be, or is, at sublime moments of joy and awe.

When everything mixes up at levels of complexity beyond human reason, but not beyond human experience, imagination and art.

Perhaps it is what Coleridge called Reason. Or not. Perhaps something else. But whatever it is, it includes the wonder that overflows and makes people make things.

... gardens, emblems of possibility, if you can just let its pleasures reach you. 

P.S. --Apologies for the pics, which do not do justice to this great garden. It was mid-day on a sunny day when I was there, and that is a hard time to get decent shots.