Easter Message

For my Easter Message, I have selected a passage from an article read several weeks ago.

It is by Wade Graham, an author in environmental science, policy and politics. I am selecting this passage because it is appropriate for Eastertime in terms of content, and because it Graham achieves in it a level of eloquence I don't often find.

In The Independent, Graham is writing of the Gardens of Santa Barbara and The Search for an American Eden: Love, Sex, and Garden Magic.

He concludes by describing the penultimate garden, Lotusland. The designer of Lotusland, he says uniquely did not "fetishize the views of distant peaks", but instead "looked down or in, not up, as she carefully framed not mountains but intricate, surreal compositions of light and color and textures of plants and stones". And that,

Walking through Lotusland is remarkably like walking through the insides of someone’s head, each garden room a fantasy or a dream, a mental space ....

The sum is beyond category, in the sense that it transcends canons of style or period and rejects anxieties of influence, borrows from many sources, and recombines them into something utterly new, because each moment is utterly passionate and personal. The result is garden magic; it suffuses the place. Here, in a garden made by a Polish immigrant in a long-running opera of self-creation, is a fully formed, completely American style: free, individuated, and intelligent, relentless in its gathering of bits of everything in the world, botanical and cultural, immersed in history but ultimately free of it, garden magic untethered.

Happy Easter, friends, bloggers, and aspirant writers!