The Personal Garden

It never occurs to us that our
garden conceit truly is an indulgence
of nature herself. We regard our gardens
as personalized reflections of ourselves
our love of the natural world, our
appreciation of the beauty that reflects
that world and our capacity for 
manipulating it to our satisfaction.
The garden is a sight to behold
capturing in a micro landscape what
our aesthetic mind and tender hands
are capable of producing. Random
sights of our garden beds reproducing
a tidy notion of nature conforming to
our fastidious and orderly inclinations
imagining that the result mirrors
what nature herself would deign to
produce gives us huge pleasure in the
pride we take as gardeners. And the
garden is more than willing to lend
itself to the charade, as vain as we are.
The complexities inherent in form and
function, the architecture of trees and
shrubs, the texture of foliage and blossoms
the colours and the scents are all, it
cannot be denied, mystical and engorge
our senses with admiration and no little
amount of self-satisfaction. The garden
in the lens of close scrutiny, detailed
and lovely, expanding to present its
totality of presence is like a set of
mirrors forever parading before our
naive eyes its endless vistas. Leading us
to forget that they are merely ours on
loan by their owner, Mother Nature.