Human Flower Project
Najaf, IRAQ
Austin, Texas USA
Chichen Itza, MEXICO
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
‘Wake Up the Energy Field!’
Showman, designer, and mobile gardener Simple lets go another wonderland before an audience of plant experts, among them seedsman-writer-fan Allen Bush.
Musicians jamming in Simple’s garden
Douglasville, PA
Photo: Rita Randolph
By Allen Bush
I am impressed by those who love their gardens. I like all sorts and have shamelessly cribbed from many. I admire English gardens - especially in England - and am still trying to figure-out what a native garden can be (having planted dozens of Kentucky native species.)
My favorite gardens are kindly tended though not always thoroughly weeded. They run the gamut from fussy to messy. I confess to a fondness for plants, though in some gardens they are scarce. Few are design originals….
A few weeks ago, my next door neighbor brought over Shocking Beauty, a book written by Thomas Hobbs, the author and garden-center owner from Vancouver, Canada. There are colorful plant combinations in dazzling garden photos from Mt. Cuba in Delaware to Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland. This leads to Hobbs’s own inspired garden, surrounding his 1930s Mission Revival-style home. Toward the end he writes about an occasional epiphany, “Being overwhelmed by what you see (in gardens) is an experience that does not happen very often.” He adds, “Gardening without fear means taking risks that saner heads would never contemplate.”
…another way of saying, a garden should be fun. Simple’s is FUN!
Though Simple’s gardens have not become fodder for a coffee table book, I’d lay down a twenty and bet Hobbs would be impressed.