Dad's Garden

For a long while I needed to do something with an area of the garden that had become a bit overgrown and hard to control.  It was an area that Dad had helped to create many years ago when he was a younger and fitter man, so I didn’t want to dig up the area completely.

I had the idea to turn it into my own Zen Garden, something peaceful and calming and that would still remind me of Dad, so we set about clearing the area.  I had a rough idea what I wanted to achieve so off we went to the local garden centre and bought stones, gravel, pots and plants.  While I was there I saw a beautiful round, solid stone globe that reminded me a little of the planet Saturn.  It cost a fortune so I left it where it was.

Back home with my goodies and we set about laying a liner first of all to help with weed control; on top of the liner we spread Portland Stone chips which glowed white in the warm sunshine; we set random flat stepping stones of slate and at the end of the pathway we added a Buddha; three black square pots planted with blue grass were added – the area was coming together nicely.

The whole time we worked in the garden a beautiful small white butterfly with a blue centre flitted around the garden.  No sooner had it moved away it was back, it seemed it couldn’t quite leave us.  Now, butterflies are quite significant for us and Dad and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me sharing this with you.  Dad had a way with getting his words wrong and mis-pronouncing them.  A few years ago, during one of his visits, we were sitting in the garden and talking about family things.  As Dad mis-pronouced the word hereditary, coming out as heri-dit-ory, a butterfly flew quite close to us.  My friend was stunned, thinking that Dad knew the name of the butterfly and we’ve laughed for years about this whenever we saw a butterfly.  So on this particular afternoon it was lovely to have the "heriditory" with us, we had Dad’s approval of the new garden.

Of course, the garden was lovely but not quite finished.  So I went back and bought the big stone – Dad’s stone in Dad’s garden.