Can This
Turn Into This?
Every year, I go on the Garden Tour in town with some friends. We are all single gals with homes and always looking for ways to care for our lawns and flowers with our most economical resources.
It’s like looking at show homes: some gardens are WOW gardens, as my friend Marilyn says. I remember one of those last year. From the front, the house was large, in a well-to-do neighborhood, but the usual house in a cul-de-sac.
Until…
We walked around the house to the back yard. Uh…the back park. That is–the park that stretched down a mountainside and had an outlook post at one point. It was like walking through the trails at the rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula. It had everything. Waterfalls, pools, bridges, fire pit, and eventually a vegetable garden close to the lookout. A few small lawns were interspersed as well. We went through there wide-eyed. Definitely a WOW garden.
But…
I don’t have a mountainside. So, what can I do? Especially when I need something that grows all by itself with very little help from me and very little moisture from God.
This year, most of the gardens were a bit more practical for those of us on limited budgets. Most of what we saw, we might even be able to do. A friend of mine suggested that in the parched (yep, this is the right word!) area I might try a dry creekbed. I couldn’t imagine it. But it seems lots of people are doing these. Now I have ideas.
Many of the gardens had pathways to different parts and I loved it. Some of the paths led to water features, others to flower or vegetable gardens. Some just made pretty designs in barren places. It got me to thinking that God created this world with dirt and a garden. He gave us, His image-bearers, work to do to tame the land.
Well, ok. Bring it on. I want to see something beautiful created in my yard. A reminder of being one of God’s images and creating—just like my Papa!
“Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good,” Genesis 1:31a.
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