In the Garden

“No earthly garden ever is just an earthly garden, for God is in the Garden.  Every garden is an image and a sacrament of the one Garden, our lost home of innocence, henceforth our inheritance.” Vigen Guroian, “The Fragrance of God.”

This afternoon I picked the three varieties of tomatoes from various areas of my garden.  All of them are cherry types.  I say various places because the red cherries have self-seeded themselves, sometimes with the help of other creatures beside myself.  They are found in both the back and front yard flower gardens.  This spring I planted one yellow cherry and one yellow pear shaped.  Becky says they look like light bulbs.  A cereal bowl of the three varieties sits on the kitchen counter a mixture of red and yellow and “light bulbs.”  The sight of them is worthy of a still life painting by a 17^th century French or Dutch artist.  The tomatoes sent me to my library to hunt up two small books by Vigen Guroian.  One is cited above and the other is “Inheriting Paradise.”

One of my goals in gardening is to have something blooming during the entire growing season.  Now don’t ask me to name the flowers that dot the four sides of the yard.  Forgetting in this case isn’t a matter of age, it’s a matter that I’m not a detail-oriented person.  Oh, I can remember the hibiscus, and the pink surprise lilies who poked their stems out of the ground like upside down flamingoes.  I also have a funky looking Mullin that traveled with me from Wisconsin.  We called it Indian Tobacco.  In its second year it shoots a stem five feet into the air with a series of small yellow blossoms along its head.  It grows wild along the sides of roads in Wisconsin.  I only let a couple grow each year, lest it take over.

I like the Guroian’s idea that every garden is an image and sacrament of Eden. It reminds us of where we came from and where we are going.