Our body politic may be hopelessly polarized, but our gardens can provide a salubrious model of how opposites can conmingle. Here a rare and obscure daisy from the Eastern United States (Marshallia grandiflora) is happily sharing space with a cool green African Galtonia viridiflora. The delicate tracery of lady fern behind (Athyrium filix femina) completes a cool midsummer idyll. I think that is Athamanta turbith in the picture below, yet another good companion (this time from Eurasia) in this vignette.
These pictures were all taken two summers ago in the Rock Alpine Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens....I feel comfortable posting these because they all date from the times (ever receding into the past) when I did much of the design and gardening in this area. These plants have comingled and persisted here--waxing and waning over the decades--with a sort of quasi ecological balance belying their ancestry and associations in Nature.Marianne Moore tells us the poetry is real frogs in imaginary gardens (close enough). I think poetry is real plant combinations that are unimaginable in nature!
Winter seems longer than I remember (despite my blissful several week sojourn in Southern California in December). As I label and scroll through old digital images preparing for two talks in Germany, I am warmed by these images in the verdant and seemingly distant Colorado summer...
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