...if you have a backyard and a kitchen, this blog might be for you!

a chronicle of tips and recipes on everything from gardening to canning and baking your produce, even if you're planted in suburbia...in fact, especially if you are planted in suburbia.



Friday, July 30, 2010

Garden Pilgrimage

Sometimes the greatest thing you can do as a gardener is to go on pilgrimage, visiting other gardens. Sacred ones especially can offer a deeply rich experience. You may have visited botanical gardens in your earlier days as a non-gardener, but I think you'll be surprised how much more these gardens "speak" to you now that you've done some of the work of tending a garden yourself. Even if the places you visit are vastly grander than your own humble backyard plot, these gardens will still seem to "belong" to you in a way they never have before; and when you do set foot again on the soil of your own garden niche, you'll feel vastly more tender toward it.

Today, I visited a beautiful retreat center, and returned with this photo journal of my walk there...first through the formal gardens with their statuary and ordered beauty, then into the wilder wooded grounds of wood-chipped trails and quiet, sunken creeks. Take a walk here with me. Sometimes it is good to just let the weeds grow for a day in your own garden--it won't make that much difference with the weeds in the ground, but could do wonders for the ones in the soul!





























































































































































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