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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Do leave a message - I would love to hear from you.