A New Travel Destination....Your Garden

With gas over $4 a gallon, we search for creative ways of satisfying our wanderlust without breaking the bank. One possibility—to revisit our gardens, not as “gardeners” but as incidental tourists in pursuit of precious spiritual healing.

At first light, the grass is deliciously cool under my bare feet as I stroll along the beds. The dark night is behind me. Delicate teardrops glisten on the leaves and blossoms that turn their faces to the rising sun. All is hushed and still, expectant—welcoming the new day. The perfume of unfolding buds drifts on the faint hint of a breeze.

Next to the stands of astilbe with its red-tinged stems and lacy foliage, a lone obedient plant is poking out of the dark earth where it hadn’t been the day before. Anything but obedient, I chuckle to myself. It is a moment of high comedy to encounter spontaneity in the midst of all that deliberate cultivation. I have stumbled on adventure, right here in my own backyard.

High noon I retrace my steps, caught up short by the shimmering waves of heat swirling around the daisies. The air is heavy with green, the scent of the tropics in our northern clime. I relish the exercise amid a sea of crimsons and whites and raucous yellows.

In my leisurely stroll, I find nature hard at work all around me. Ponderous in flight, bees move to a droning cadence from flower to flower under the glare of the midday sun. Velvety orange against the hot pink of the peonies, butterflies swoop and soar, all grace and restless energy. In the pine branches overhead, the shadow of a hawk contemplates lunch scurrying about, foraging down below. I curl up in the shade with a good book, half-listening to the frenzied stirrings of life in the garden going on around me.

Night falls slowly, in a distant blaze of oranges and purples across the water of Little Traverse Bay. Twilight spreads over the garden like a blanket pulled tight around me. Weary petals curl in upon themselves, holding in the warmth of the sun. Like the foothills of some storied mountain range, monochrome as the night itself, the plantings stretch out into the moonlight, all grays and blues and dark shadows.

The garden sleeps. With a full day behind me, I too am ready to rest.

My travels have taken me from Eden to the equator to the Appalachians in a single day. No travel agency could have plotted an itinerary as intimate or refreshing.

The Creator walked the garden, the ancient text reminds me, and found it good. And at the end of the day, the Creator rested.