I have been reading the Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz lately. As a poet he connects artistic process, language and poetry to garden spaces. These lines are a miraculous distillation of some of what I also find moving about gardens:
The garden communicates what it shows to you but you also contribute to the garden some of what you are seeking in your own life, your own state of being. One reason a garden can speak to you is that it is both its own reality and a manifestation of the interior life of the mind that imagined it in the beginning.
The following are some photos from my time at the Chicago Botanic garden. The images describe how I was inspired by the place and the intersection of events in my life at that time, as Kunitz so eloquently describes in the passage above. It truly is an amazing place – one that I am looking forward to going back to, and one that I am grateful to have been during that time.
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| Stormwater Swale |
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| Larch |
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| Jensen Inspired Council Ring |
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| White Trillium |
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| Mayapple |
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| Japanese Garden |
