A special welcome to each of you! This “For the Earth” NESTER post features the significance of the “home garden’s” role in the continuing effort to increase the respect we all need to have for nature. All the quotations in the post come from The Wild Braid, a book by poet Stanley Kunitz with Genine 
Lentine. In his 100th year, Kunitz’s book is filled with wisdom about gardens and life.
To illustrate Kunitz’s insights, all the photographs are either from our friends’ gardens or from our current neighborhood. To all the gardeners who have shared their beautiful gardens with Lorelie and me through the years, a hearty thank you! You have enriched our lives! We are delighted to share them with you!
Tim
THE GARDEN AS AN EXPERIENCE
I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive,
and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience
that is separate from what the garden can signify
in its eagerness and its insistence,
and its driving energy to live – to grow, to bear fruit.
Stanley Kunitz
THE GARDEN IMAGINED
In the beginning a garden holds infinite possibilities. What sense of its nature, or its kingdom, is it going to convey? It represents a selection, not only of whatever individual plants we consider to be beautiful, but also a synthesis that creates a new kind of beauty, that of a complex and multiple world. What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.
Stanley Kunitz
THE GARDEN - A COSMOS IN MINIATURE
The garden is, in a sense, the cosmos in miniature, condensation of the world that is open to your senses. It doesn’t end at the limits of your own parcel of land, or your own state, or your nation. Every cultivated plot of ground is symbolic of the surprises and ramifications of life itself in all its varied forms, including the human.
Stanley Kunitz
THE GARDEN AND THE LAND
It is imperative for any gardener to respect the land before alterations, modifications, or plans for the design of the garden are made. If a garden doesn’t fit into that landscape and reflect it in some way, it’s an invasion, an occupation.
Certainly, gardening has many collaborative aspects to it. You are helping to create a living poem. Philosophically, the garden is a co-creation, it expresses something of the place itself, something that any human intervening there must respect.
Stanley Kunitz
THE GARDEN'S MYSTERY
Once you have perceived the garden as a whole, the individual tiers of the garden take on a different form because you have seen them both as a part and as a whole. “One of the mysteries of gardening is that the garden reflects the viewer’s own state of being at the time, just as your response to a poem lets you know something about your preoccupations or your susceptibility as you read it.
Stanley Kunitz
THE MINDFUL GARDENER
The main obligations of the gardener are to be mindful of the garden’s needs and to be observant each day of what is going on in the garden. And it compels you to structure your life because there are things you have to do at certain times.
Stanley Kunitz
The garden communicates what it shows to you but you also contribute to the garden some of what you are seeking in terms of your own life, your own state of being. One reason the garden can speak to you is that it is both its own reality and a manifestation of the interior life of the mind that imagined it in the beginning.
Stanley Kunitz
THANK YOU FOR FOR VISITING THE NESTER!
CREDITS FOR POSTS:
Writer: Stanley Kunitz
Graphic Designer: Tim Olson
Photo editors: Lorelie & Tim Olson
Editors: Lorelie & Tim Olson
NESTER url: https://notesfromanester.com
To view the previous For the Earth post, “Edward Abbey’s Thoughts pn the Desert . . .”- click here
