#Write31Days 29 • Garden

And Gardens
Gardens everywhere! Flowers, fruits, veggies. Today I'm particularly considering flower gardens—apartment window boxes, city parks, annual exhibits or Flower Shows, flowers to admire, and flowers to pick, take inside, and arrange into bouquets. When I worked downtown in the CBD, street vendors sold fresh-picked bouquets all year round, usually at an affordable price. Blooms lined up and ready to offer a splash of color, an opportunity for joy in your home or my home, created types of gardens, too.

Joni Mitchell's classic "Woodstock" – made part of the soundtrack of our lives by CSNY – insists we need to get back to the garden. After the majestic, ordered, creation account of Genesis 1 (that for some reason extended through Genesis 2:3 after they divided scripture into chapters and verses), in 2:15 we read, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it." Eden must have been a basic multi-purpose garden for growing everything. The New Testament ends with the garden well-stewarded and grown into a city, but in-between we have the garden of resurrection that's the opening scene of the New Creation. So God has taken us back to the garden, given humanity another chance to plant, cultivate, and harvest gifts from the ground to help feed everyone, to beautify everyone's places and spaces.

Images:

Whenever possible I blog my own photos and art. Back to the Garden header art is from my 5-part Whimsies series; photo to the left of my words about gardens is from Balboa Park in Previous City San Diego during August 2013. Charleston, SC window box is from RGB stock. To my knowledge I've never been in Charleston, but I've heard so much about its flowers, its doors, its style and southernness I had to include something Charlestonian with this post. "Charlestonian?" Yes. Breaking with my intention to include only places I'd visited and remembered. When I took The New South class, our first assignment was to write about our experience with the south. One of my classmates explained she was not primarily a Southerner, a South Carolinian, or even an American. She was Charlestonian.