Seeing With Your Ears and Nose
It is winter – nothing pretty to see, nothing fragrant to smell, and no landscape to enjoy until spring. Step into your garden and close your eyes. Listen to the wind as it rustles through the grasses and hugs branches so that they brush together. Is the brook still babbling and gurgling? Of course. As snow melts listen to the drink it brings to wildlife with its slow dripping.
Inhale winter; it smells of clearness, freshness, the warmth and friendship of wood fires, the promise of the seasons still to come. Close your eyes and open your ears and nose – enjoy and relax in the rest that winter brings. Store up these sensations for times when you are stressed or hurried. They feel good.
This past year a client of mine passed away from Cancer. Ellen created a beautiful indoor condolence garden that now sits on his wife’s desk at work. Having recently suffered the loss of her husband, I was happy to be able to give her a gift that would live on long after the funeral flowers had died.
Ellen’s care for her clients and her plants is obvious in her special “care instructions” that come with each indoor garden giving specific directions for how to care for the plants chosen. Personally, I could kill a fake plant but would have been able to follow the instructions that came with the garden.
I am very grateful to have Ellen’s name and number at hand and to use or recommend for any of my own or my clients’, family, or friends’ custom gardening needs!
Thank you Ellen!!
Thank you, Lara. It is very rewarding to me to craft a specialty garden that is enjoyed by the giver as well as the recipient. A condolence specialty garden becomes a living memorial to the loved one.