January 24th, 2016
What is a garden? What is a garden for ...? At first glance, these seem like very obvious and quick-response questions. For ordinary mortals, a garden is a more or less large space in which a series of plants and some other materials are arranged with greater or lesser success and taste.
What is it for? To enjoy it? For leisure? ...
For me a garden is much more, it goes much further. For me, a garden is and it should be a work of art ... and as such a container of feelings, an accumulation of sensations. The garden is for the senses.
Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, like the five clearly conceptualized senses ... perceptions, sensations and magic that at times immerse us in a sea of emotions that are difficult to classify.
Sight to perceive colors in their wide range of tones and hues. Thus, leaving aside the obviousness of the color of the flowers that give us beautiful moments, from the purest and simple white of an Iceberg Rose to the last Tulip crops of an almost zaino black ( "Queen of the night" tulip), they make us run through the entire color spectrum.
In addition to these gifts, there are others that are perhaps more subtle and are those tones and shades that emerge from the color green. The elegance and sobriety of a garden "in green" is hardly unmatched.
Hearing to alert us of arrivals, to warn us of unforeseen events or simply to immerse ourselves in a cluster of sensations only perceived through our ears.
If you have not enjoyed it yet, I encourage you to "hear and listen" to the garden ... I close my eyes right now and I can continue to delight myself with an autumn afternoon prior to one of those storms that stir everything up, and that bamboo forest comes to mind with its recurring beating of reeds and leaves…. simply magical.
Smell that takes us to evocative moments and places. From the delicate perfume exhaled by the small flowers of the Cyclamen Persicum or the Muget of the valleys to the penetrating scent of jasmine or the lady of the night, the perfumes and essences that distil from the plants and flowers provide moments of carnal sensuality. Not in vain the world of perfume and cosmetics mark the print of these delicate emitters on human skin.
Taste. Who has not believed to die of pleasure when savoring some ripe raspberries or an aromatic tomato just plucked from its bush? Who has been able to resist the temptation to nibble on a velvety peach or some sweet and turgid grapes ...?
We can go a little further and dare to savor the delicacy of some nasturtium, violet or pink petals or collect in our mouths the sweet nectar that distills from the chalice of Salvia Grahamii.
Touch is, perhaps, out of all the senses the least immediately perceptible in a garden, but it is certainly the one that provokes the most emotions.
Walking barefoot through a thin and damp bermuda meadow a few days after being cut, touching the velvet of the petals of ancient roses, crunching the fleshy leaves of star jasmine or laurel between your fingers, caressing tufts of grasses just before flowering as if they were a silky mane, shaping and tracing the roundness of plums or of soft, lustrous apples.
I don't know ... I write at night and wait for dawn to discover new and powerful sensations to add ....
From all these experiences and sensations the garden drinks and is nourished, or at least that is how I understand that it should be.
By Laura Pou