Wintertime is perhaps the most challenging season mother nature brings us year after year. In Colorado, winter reminds me of how vulnerable I am as a human being — reliant on the shelter of buildings, automobiles and insulated clothing to stay alive.
There’s a beauty to recognizing this vulnerability, because all this time inside allows me to dream of spring, waiting to burst forth. After all, part of nature’s power lies in her commitment to constant change. Once we have gotten used to living in a deep freeze, the world begins to thaw and expand into the budding, buzzing chaos of spring.
No living form represents the gorgeous impermanence of existence better than the FLOWER. When flowering plants evolved on Earth eons ago, there was an explosion of biodiversity because of the promiscuous life cycles and genetic mixing that flowers inspired. Of course, without flowers, we would not be here. Almost all of our food comes from flowering plants. Flowers inspire art, poetry and design. Would humans have invented the wheel if we had never seen the form of a flower?
For the next month or so, you can find me peering at spring from the depths of winter, scouring plant catalogs, ordering organic vegetable seeds, desert willows, Japanese red pines, and pale pink poppies not available in the local nursery trade. I’ll be waiting out the doldrums of February and the split personality (lion/lamb) of March, watching for bright green buds to appear and knowing that flowers aren’t far behind. The exact schedule of these events is yet unknown, and fully out of my control. Our mother Nature is powerful, chaotic, beautiful and full of wonder, and we are part of all of HER world. As a landscape architect, I believe that much of my job is simply watching nature in all of her entropic glory and trying to keep up.
My practice is about connecting people with the landscapes that surround us, that we depend on. I want my clients to feel joy and happiness when they're in their gardens — to feel connected to this life-world that we spring from and to feel their part within it.
