Gardenbound: A Maplehurst Tour

May 25, 2017

 

A garden, unlike a house, is never still. It is not an object but a moment. To observe a garden, one must catch it like a butterfly in a net (but please do let it go again. Beauty cannot be preserved or it ceases to be itself).

 

 

When I give someone a tour of the gardens here at Maplehurst, I catch myself crying, “Oh, if only you had seen the daffodils that bloomed last week.” I am like a mother pouring over baby photos while the child who was that baby tugs at my hand, begging me to play another round of Candyland.

My heart inclines towards nostalgia, and I am easily tangled in the past, but today’s garden is only for today. I must pay attention or I’ll miss it, and there are no encores, no second chances.

Why keep a garden? Why grow flowers? The arguments against it are persuasive. A garden will keep you tethered because to plant something is to make a promise: I will clear the weeds from around you, I will bring you water when the sky turns dry. I will not walk away.

But there are worse things than being kept at home because someone there needs us. The word “homebound” alludes to difficult and heartbreaking realities, but it also speaks of the way home can hold us and keep us steady. And to live as one “bound for home” is to live as a pilgrim sure of the welcome that waits for us.

 

 

Right now this garden flows as swiftly as a swollen river. By mid-summer, its movement will have slowed to a trickle, though it never does stop.

The gift of a garden is that it brings movement and change to the still point that is our home.

In spring, I lift my eyes from washing dishes, feeding children, folding laundry, and all those tasks that keep me tied, through love and obligation, to this place. I lift them toward the open window, and I say,

Look! The world is new again.

 

 

Elizabeth and I are homebound. She, a writer of poetry and prose, is bound to Mersea, a 1904 white Victorian nestled in the historic district of a South Carolina shrimping village. I am bound to Maplehurst, a red-brick farmhouse built by Pennsylvania Quakers in 1880. We are both writers, wives, and mothers, but nearly twenty years and hundreds of miles lie between us.

Elizabeth and I exchanged a few “homebound” letters over Lent. The nature of a letter is to communicate over a distance, but the season of Lent introduced other distances – there was the space between winter and spring, the break between longing and fulfillment, and the chasm, so like a tomb, between death and new life. But what is Lent, after all, but a kind of long homecoming? It is a practice of return and a way of erasing distance.

Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them (Psalm 126:6).

For Elizabeth and I, Easter has meant trading the distance of letter writing for the intimacy of a visit, first with a home tour and today with a tour of the garden. 

Here is our invitation to Elizabeth’s garden at Mersea.

 

 

6 Comments

  1. J.L. Sanborn

    Beautiful! Thank you for sharing beauty today.

    Reply
  2. Katie

    “The gift of a garden is that it brings movement and change to the stillpoint that is our home.”
    Christie, this statement made me think. I often wonder if and hope that guests coming to our front door see our flower beds sort of as a “red carpet” laid out for them. I want them not to be only be beautiful for us, but welcoming and gladdening to friends and family.
    Your paragraph just above the pink dogwood image, I’ve copied in my notebook because I so passionately agree:
    “There are worse things than being kept at home because someone there needs us. The word “homebound” alludes to difficult and heart breaking realities, but it also speaks of the way home can hold us and keep us steady. And to live as one “bound for home” is to live as a pilgrim sure of the welcome that waits for us.”
    Thank you for sharing your beautiful garden:)
    Gratefully,
    Katie

    Reply
  3. Melissa Manier

    Beautiful, and perfect. Thank you for this, and all you have shared, and continue to share.
    I love your book, and sharing your world brings me peace.
    Happy Spring!

    Reply
  4. Karen Q

    Your garden is so beautiful, peaceful and welcoming. Thank you for the invite today, I really enjoyed!

    Reply
  5. Theresa B.

    Just amazing! Love it, love seeing the spring season. God is so good, to think He didn’t have to create all this beauty, but He did, for us all to enjoy…amazing!

    Reply
  6. Alison Lehr

    Sweet new life ?

    Reply

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