Everyday Canvas

Is Gardening an Art Form?

Prompt: It could be said that gardening like painting and photography is as much as an art as it is a passion and nature's abundant variety offers a seemingly limitless palette to the gardener, providing not just visual appeal but life-sustaining nourishment. What are your views on this?

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This prompt immediately brought to mind Monet’s garden. It was that very garden that inspired the painter.

Is gardening an art form? It has to be. It takes just as much work, sweat, and discipline as what we put on a page or a canvas.

Amateur or professional, a gardener is someone who is producing and enjoying an art form. Although one may need some kind of a license to be considered a garden designer, who says an amateur--who puts into effect, on impulse, his very own gardening ideas--is any less of an artist?

More than twenty-five years ago, when we owned a place with about two acres of backyard, I raised vegetables and designed my own rose garden, in which I had about 55 rose bushes. On one bush, I grafted five different roses. It was a delight to see the bush bloom in different colors and shapes. That bush lasted only two years after a lot of hard work, which meant digging up one side of the bush all the way to its roots and letting it rest flat covered up in winter. Since the second winter was extremely cold and I couldn’t properly keep the bush warm. The bush didn’t come back for its third year of life. Still, the memory of it still lingers.

More than anything, I miss putting up a chair in between the rows of rose bushes and reading. It was like poetry turned into a rose garden. Maybe because of that experience, I can still sense the words of a lovely poem to be like those rose bushes of yore.