A flower garden can teach us about time and how it works. Anyone who has lost themselves working in a garden knows intuitively about the elasticity of time. It ebbs and flows as we “lose track of time.” This is Nature’s time. It differs markedly from our human-centric mechanical time.
Mechanical time is the clock ticking. It is rigid and unyielding. Days are broken up into hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds. Mechanical time puts constant pressure on our lives and makes us forget about the things that really matter.
Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century German Christian mystic, derided mechanical time as an obstacle in our lives: “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.”
Nature’s time, on the other hand, is made up of fits and starts. It is the unfolding of a flower, smooth and rhythmic; it is the torrent rush of rain in a summer squall. It is as eternal as a granite boulder and as fleeting as a snowflake on a sunny winter day.
Einstein explained that our dualistic reality is a blend of space and time. His scientific premise is echoed in the well-known phrase of American author Ram Dass: “Be here now.” Gardens can help us do just that. We watch the annual unfurling of leaves and the bursting of buds, the ripening of berries. And we hear the familiar crunch of autumn leaves underfoot.
Nature’s time needs no watches to measure it. The sun’s rays and the moon’s waxing and waning are its keepers. The flowers that bloom through the year are its sentinels.
Flowers need no watches to tell time—they follow Nature’s rhythmic time. Here, an elegant deep purple lisianthus blossom blends beautifully with the spires of Delphinium’s sky-blue flowers. This elegant perennial adds a beautiful vertical accent to any garden. It is known for its range of blue flowers. It prefers alkaline soil. After blooming in spring, cut back to 3 inches tall, add some compost, and you will get another round of blooms later in the year. Deer and rabbit resistant. Does not fare well in hot, dry weather. Zones 3–7.
An armillary sphere is one of the oldest astronomical instruments in the world. They are now usually used as a sundial. The armillary sundial is an open sphere circled by a ring with a gnomon in the shape of an arrow. It is set upon a tall base. As the sun travels across the sky, the gnomon casts a shadow onto the base surface that indicates the hour. I placed this in a flower garden I created for a dear client and friend.
Up until the early 19th century, sundials were a main instrument people used to tell time. A sundial tracks the position of the sun and the shadows fall on the general hour marker on its face. When positioning a sundial, align it to true north. Use a compass app on your cell phone to locate the direction of north. I set this small sundial in a flower garden. Photo by Laura Hendrix McKillop.