Because of my website, I get at least one e-mail a day, often many a day,
from people who either thought paghat.com was a nursery & wanted to buy
from me a plant I discussed, or who are hoping I will send them seeds or
cuttings from my garden, or most common of all, people sweetly wanting to
share with me emotional feelings about certain plants they found me
praising.

My own feelings while roaming amidst or caring for or sitting between
plants is very emotional, & I've sometimes tried to figure out where this
emotion comes from. A nostalgia for a lost connection with our primitive
selves who lived better integrated into nature? Merely an aesthetic
response to things that are incredibly beautiful? People often associate
plants with lost parents or grandparents, & want in their gardens things
that were the favorites of vanished loved ones. So there's something
deeply spiritual going on, that at a very basic (instinctual?) level sees
the cycle of life & death in the garden & associates that with our own
lives & deaths & possible survival into future lives or afterlife.

From the number of letters I've gotten with tales of the gardens &
individual plants of childhood, I think the largest part of this
spiritual-feeling response to gardens & gardening originates in early
imprinting of what must have been the very first beautiful things we ever
saw in the world around us -- plus, where blossoms are concerned, our
first encounter with the ephemerality of of all things, what in buddhism
101 is called mono-no-aware, "the tragedy of things," which is also the
essence of awesome beauty.

The environments we create for ourselves indoors don't seem to have quite
this same lifelong emotional complexity. Do we need a davenport like
grandma's? Does the wallpaper have to be the same as in our personal
bedroom when we were small? Are we nostalgic for the same bathroom tiles
or kitchen linoleum of the places wherein we learned to crawl, then stand?
Well, maybe a bit -- I have very emotional responses when I see long
thickly built folksy kitchen tables like my great-grandma's, & something
as horrible to eat as fried cornmush tastes wonderful because grandma used
to make it for us. But to great extent the more inexplicable & more
powerful nostalgia arises from a rugged old Granny Smith appletree similar
to the one my granny Elva planted when she was newly married & which was a
sprawling huge thing when great-grandchildren came along. Or a mountain
ash like the one all the children climbed in in her front yard. Or a
strawberry patch reminiscent of grampa's strawberry field before he turned
it into cornrows of dahlias. Even the odor of a leaflitter or a decaying
stump pulls at the heartstrings in ways the odor grandma's witchhazel body
splash or grandpa's Old Spice could not quite equal.

Nostalgia & sentiment for people & relations, one would suppose, should
have to do more with the color of their clothes, the odors inside their
houses, the songs they hummed to themselves & we learned from them....
certainly nostalgia has its power in all these things, but for many of us
the deepest feelings are just slightly aside from the interior world of
the dweelings & individuals from childhood, & is more to be found outside,
in the garden. It doesn't even have to be the same plants, as I think the
nostalgia goes so far back it predates our very births, & really is about
that lost & purer connection to nature, which would include to family.
Perhaps it is a nostalgia for a syrupy Rockwellian fantasy of things that
never were, of promises that were abroad in a culture so shattered those
promises never had a chance of being kept -- a nostalgia for our own
individual innocences & our hopeful beliefs in a world we were once able
to view naively with awareness of fewer tragedies.

I would feel a bit weird for my own whelling emotionalism while in the
garden if not for those emails received from so many people who seem to
have the same emotional response to shrubs & trees & flowers.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/