Everyday Canvas

Welcoming Spring

Prompt: "I love spring anywhere but if I could choose, I would always greet it in a garden." How do you feel about this?

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Surely, gardens can be delightful especially if they are well-kept. I particularly like English gardens with green rolling hills and wide-open landscaping; then, when they are topped with a historic building, a Gothic structure, or a column and a fountain, such gardens are absolutely charming.

As much as I like gardens, in early spring, I would want to be out in the wilderness where wild flowers, weeds, ant hills, and birds on budding trees sing their songs to the awakening mother nature. Sometimes behind the brush or near a boulder, I would love to come across a sprawling doe or a twisting creek newly born from the spring rains. But then, I always liked wild things, the way nature took care of them on its own without the human hands butting into its business.

Up north where we had a large land once, we left the end section of the land free and wild in respect of nature, because we had read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and was greatly impressed by it at the time. We didn’t venture in that wild area and neither did we let our kids enter it.

One spring, out of curiosity, I dared to make my way through the brush, the thickets, and the closely webbed trees into our little wilderness. I was flabbergasted when I saw that, there, rhododendrons, forsythia bushes, and azaleas had been growing profusely surrounded by and under the canopy of tall trees, whose fallen leaves in the fall had left a rusty carpet on the ground, like a hidden magic fairy garden. I know no one ever sowed those bushes there; so, it had to be the birds and the squirrels. The way I see it, human hands couldn’t accomplish that beauty so easily, especially in a place left intentionally wild. I think mother nature knows its business much better than we ever give her credit.