WHEREVER I GO, MY EYES ARE WORKING OVERTIME, and always in the back of my mind is the question, “What is beautiful?” Many gardeners have a stilted definition of beauty, having been lectured at too often about what we are supposed to find beautiful. But I am an equal-opportunity seeker of the sublime, grateful to appreciate it wherever I find it.
In my work, I do a lot of traveling, sometimes abroad but much of it on the roads between Maryland and Connecticut, my sales territory for Sunny Border Nurseries. Over the years, I have seen some grand gardens, both in this country and others—the gardens of royalty, castles, and country houses. I am certainly glad to have had these experiences. They have given me more inspiration than I could ever put into my garden, even if I lived nine lives. But I can just as easily be inspired by simpler scenes closer to home.
In nearby Lancaster County, I see Amish vegetable gardens, so simple yet so elegant and beautiful that I cannot help but pull over to get a closer look. Once while sitting in my car in front of such a garden, I had a roadside epiphany of sorts. I had always thought that beauty in a garden was all about plants and how we used them, and that certainly is a big part of it for me. But it is also about the love a gardener expresses in tending a space—love for the plants, love for the family that will be eating the plants, love of beauty for its own sake—love that radiates out into the world and draws empathic folk right off the road, to sit at the wheel and soak it in.
On one particularly memorable day, I was driving a back road on my way to a nursery and saw a front-yard combination that stopped me dead. On both sides of a sidewalk leading up to the front door, the gardener had underplanted orange daylilies and purple liatris with yellow coreopsis, using yuccas in full bloom as eye-catching sentinels at either end. This combination could have been at the White House; it could have been a double border leading to the front door of a castle. I have to thank that anonymous gardener, because the moment she or he created will feed me for a lifetime.
Though I saw nothing in this front yard garden that was poised to take the stage after this combination had faded, in that moment it was perfect—and when you get down to it, these take-your-breath-away moments are what gardening is all about, what we are all trying to create. Maybe not just one moment—the more time and thought we put into it, the more layers and nuance we pack into our gardens, the more of these moments we can string together. But life, after all, is lived only one moment at a time. The rest is history, or in the unknowable future. Perhaps because I have been near death twice, or maybe just because I am a perennial optimist, I have learned to pause and appreciate each moment as it comes, for what it is.
This beautiful moment in the garden relies entirely on the color, shapes, and textures of foliage.
The white form of Cercis chinensis.
