The Big Picture

Posted on July 13, 2014 by composerinthegarden

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are. ~Alfred Austin

Bench swallowed by hydrangeas, 2013

I haven’t photographed with a wide angle lens in my garden for many seasons. The crisp circular pattern of paths that originally defined the shape and structure of the garden declined over the years, shifting under the influence of weather, gravity, and life’s unexpected challenges. Last summer’s heavy rainfalls rendered the paths unusable at the lowest point of the garden and moisture loving plants – Hydrangea, daylilies, Lobelia – quickly colonized the rich muck. Perhaps you remember a post from last year, That Particular One, where all of my garden photos focused on the details of flowers, excluding the messy bigger picture.

But this week, the wide angle lens went back onto the camera and I celebrated the renewed structure and shape of the garden on the completion of the rebuilt paths. Determined to reclaim my horticultural territory, I hired a local company, Best Feeds Outdoor Design, to dig out the dirt of the paths, add edging and drainage, and fill with various layers of gravel. Muscular men dug and removed cubic yards of soil and wheeled in barrels of stone in extremely hot and humid weather, a job I had unrealistically expected to accomplish myself until I came to my senses.

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Now, the original shape of the garden I designed from the upper deck looking down has been restored, and not only has the appearance of the garden changed dramatically, it is a pleasure to walk through it.

Garden and woodland

Since most of my free time is spent in the garden, I often tend to see it as a metaphor for my life and this newest development was no exception. What struck me immediately as I meandered through the paths was how different the garden looked and felt, even though the same plants were in the same place – all the beauty of blossom and leaf remained but were framed in a very different way. Restoring a firm structure made them appear more beautiful than before, like adding a frame to a painting to add definition and draw the eye. What had become a chaotic ramble among lovely plants is now beauty contained in a pleasing form, a balance between strong lines and cascades of color. The wild woodlands surrounding the garden now seem even more mysterious and primeval in contrast to the firm human hand of design and form.

This shift in perception has made me consider the desirability for clearer boundaries in my own artistic life, perhaps finding a better balance between daily structure and creative abandon. I’m beginning to turn a wide angle lens on my life, looking for balance and beauty in the big picture.

“A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.” ~ Michael Pollan

Floral Fireworks

Posted on July 3, 2014 by composerinthegarden

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers. ~Basho

My father was born on the 4th of July, so we always had a double reason to celebrate the holiday. And did we ever! As a family of musicians, we transformed our neighborhood block party into a morning parade, recruiting my father’s band students and anyone in the neighbor who could play The Stars and Stripes Forever while marching. The rest of the day was an ongoing musical feast in the form of continuous jam sessions, the repertoire ranging from jazz standards to German polka band arrangements. Sometimes there were local fireworks at night but more often, we lit sparkler wands and drew pictures in the night air to a backdrop of fireflies (locally known as lightening bugs) who ignored our fiery antics.

Now my 4th of July is usually spent enjoying the floral fireworks in the garden. Daylilies of all shapes, colors, and sizes are the feature, surrounded by true lilies, salvias, roses, flowering shrubs and clematis. 4th of July fireworks indeed! Enjoy the images (click on any photo to trigger the gallery slideshow) and have a happy and safe holiday. (All images ©2014 Lynn Emberg Purse, All Rights Reserved)

Daylilies 'Etched Eyes' & 'Vampire LeStat'

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment. ~Georgia O’Keeffe

For my followers, I’ve wrapped up a demanding and complicated few months and am happy to return to blogging, gardening and composing. I look forward to visiting your sites and seeing what is new with you 🙂

Willy-nilly

Posted on April 11, 2014 by composerinthegarden

“Willy-nilly” – in a haphazard or spontaneous manner ~ The Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Iris reticulata ‘Harmony’

Yesterday, the warmth and sunshine of a beautiful April day lingered into evening, a perfect time to work in the garden. I had an agenda, a list – prune the roses, rake the leaves, pull the weeds. I pruned the blackened branches of roses that were damaged by a harsh winter and was delighted to discover green growth at the roots. That was as far down the list as I got. I paused to smell the wind carrying the scent of spring, I watched a pair of robins argue over territory, and my feet wandered over the paths drawn to bits of green and blue and yellow arising from the ground.

Rose hellebore

The “to do” list was forgotten and I moved willy-nilly through the garden, meandering, clipping here and there as I went, without plan or order. At work, I am the planner, the doer, the architect of outcomes. But on entering the garden, the plan became a burden that I happily surrendered. I shilly-shallied through a garden lit by golden evening light, my ears open to bird song while my fingers stroked the tender new leaves emerging from the earth. I began to dream instead of plan, I began to imagine instead of control, I began to be instead of act.

Daffodil ‘Verdant Meadow’

After a few hours of meandering with snippers in hand, caught up in the magic of a gentle spring evening, I discovered that my hands had pruned the hydrangeas, weeded the garden beds and cleared last year’s leaves from the stone steps. The garden was clear of debris and ready to grow. My orderly list of chores was somehow accomplished as part of a relaxed ramble, an afterthought to the real business of connecting with the magical world around me. Perhaps I need a little more willy-nilly time and allow myself to be a dreamer and a sillyheart more often.

“I don’t think I want to know a six-year-old who isn’t a dreamer, or a sillyheart.” ~ Uncle Buck

That Particular One

Posted on July 5, 2013 by composerinthegarden

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail. ~ Pablo Picasso

Bench swallowed by hydrangeas

Blame it on the weather – we seem to have re-entered Pennsylvania’s carboniferous period, the Paleozoic era of tropical rain forests that produced those rich fields of coal, oil, and natural gas that are so currently in contention. Daily rainstorms and high temperatures have spurred green growth so luxuriant that garden paths are now covered in green plants rather than brown mulch and every garden plant is double its normal size. It is a child’s garden for adults, as I look up into the blooms of daylilies and roses above my head and vainly try to temper nature’s enthusiasm for this state of affairs.

As a result, I offer here portraits of flowers, bewitching, entrancing, and totally designed to disguise the unruly and weedy carpet at their feet. Any pretense at horticultural control is gone – oh, this is not a polite or nice summer garden – this is unruliness and passion at its best. So, I have narrowed my view, for purposes of this post, to the particular – the particular flower, the particular point of view, the one instead of the many. If I cannot control the garden with snippers and shovel, I will control its perception with the camera lens and what it can reveal through each flower, each leaf, each drop of rain.

So many elements conspire to create this cunundrum! This was to be the year of the “total garden” – the wide view of well-defined spaces and elegant combination of elements. “Hah!” said nature and life. “You may wish for control and balance but it is not to be so! Enjoy the wild effusive growth of garden plants and weeds in equal measure and enjoy life to the fullest.” In other words, grow or die.

This week, as I try to complete a large and ambitious piece of music, I am constantly challenged. This note or that, this idea or that. It is the quantuum challenge, of choosing the particular from the field of possibilities. As a composer, I can only trust inner instincts and own my musical choices as I wander through the sound landscape and choose “this, not that.”

Enjoy this little photo gallery of the particular – the blooms that shine above the chaos of riotous growth and change. I now return to my studio to continue pursuing the choice of particular notes.

Daylily in the light

Daylily ‘Desert Dreams’

Daylily ‘Neal Berry’

Daylily ‘Dark Star’

Daylily ‘Diabolique’

Daylily ‘Diabolique’ closeup

Daylily ‘Amy Michele’

Daylily ‘Eggplant Ecstasy’

Daylily ‘Her Majesty’s Wizard’

Daylily ‘Jan’s Twister’

Alstromeria ‘Sweet Laura’

Daylily ‘Etched Eyes’

Daylily ‘Night Wings’

Daylily ‘Roger Grounds’

Raindrops on purple smoke bush

Daylily ‘Blue Eyed Butterfly’

Daylily ‘Shaka Zulu’

Daylily ‘Speak of Angels’

To see more daylilies in my garden, see last year’s post “Beauty for a Day”

We Must Be Mad With Joy

Posted on May 24, 2013 by composerinthegarden

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” ~Iris Murdoch, Irish author

Garden after rain

The thunderstorms passed by quickly, leaving a few large drops of rain in their wake and some empty threats of weather violence. We have fared far better than our neighbors in the American West, those unfortunate victims of extreme tornados who still struggle to recover their lives. Even as I grieve for them, I celebrate my own small corner of land in the foothills of western Pennsylvania.

Tonight, the garden in twilight is luxuriating in its richness of leaf and flower and I cannot end my stroll. It is bewitching. Leaves of every shape and form spring out and blend – all of the plants in my garden touch and jostle each other – no Puritan “touch me not” unplanted spaces here! Oh, this is an excess of green and growing that sings a great chorus in the dusk of a warm early summer day. Yes, many plants bloom in May – the insignia of iris, the globes of allium, the stars of clematis, the blooms of columbine, lilac and others. But May is feckless in its headlong plunge into green growth from the carpet beneath one’s feet to the canopy among the trees. May is fragrant and headstrong, the vibrant green path leading and spilling us into June.

Lamb’s ear rising up to bloom

The silver lamb’s ear have risen to a foot high impossibility in the past few days, ready to bloom and nourish the bees –their bright foliage outlines the beds in the garden. The swords of daylily leaves create circular swirls of green blades, predicting their July bloom – a promise of color and form to come. Beauty bush and lilac burst with thousands of tiny flowers, mounds of color and scent that greet the morning and bless the warmth of the evening, alive with the buzzing of bees seeking nectar. And so it goes. May is so full of voluptuous beauty and scented flowers that it sends the senses reeling with the experience of it, making us mad with joy.

Wild black cherry (Prunus serotina)

The surrounding woods are filled with the blooms of native black cherry, dangling white racemes that scent the air with their sweetness. Every day, a dozen new flowers awake and open and bring a new shape and scent to the bounty of the garden. I can hardly keep up; I mulch and trim and plant seedlings but it is as if I were on the end of the “crack the whip” game – I can only hold on tight and try my best to serve the beauty of the garden as I am flung and swung through its spurt of green growth and scented flowering. Here are a few images captured that may share some small part of this beauty; click on the first image to open the gallery. (All photographs ©2013 Lynn Emberg Purse)