🎵If I could save time in a bottle

The first thing that I’d like to do

Is to save every day till eternity passes away 🎵

My (very) late mother used to remark how rapidly time passes as we age and I certainly know what she meant. But even when I was younger, I could see how our perception of time changes. When we are seven, a year is a seventh of our lifetime which seems a remarkably long time. When we are seventy – not quite yet in my case but looming ever closer – a year is but a seventieth of our time spent so far on earth. And time does indeed seem to pass at an alarming rate.

I find it almost beyond comprehension that we are coming to the end of the third year of the pandemic that turned our world inside out. Three years? Already? Three years in March in this country since the then deputy prime minister issued an alarming warning to New Zealanders abroad to get home now while they still could. It sounded overly dramatic at the time but within just a few days, borders started closing and flights ceased.

Thank goodness for the garden which is our anchor and our refuge.

It was thinking about those who want to freeze time in the garden that brought Jim Croce’s song to my mind. I must have said it before, but I will say again: gardening is a process not a product that can be frozen in time. I fully understand that it is not everybody’s cup of tea. There are many things in life that are of little interest to me. Activities like golf, going to the gym or All Blacks rugby bypass me entirely. I am not a fan of mosaics and I very rarely go to the movies. I garden almost every day. I don’t garden with a view to reaching the final goal of getting the place looking exactly how I want it and expecting it to remain like that.  If that is a personal goal, take up interior design instead, is my advice. It is easier to stage a scene and freeze it in time indoors.

But there are moments in time when I look at the garden – sometimes a full scene or vista and sometimes just a close-up of a small section – and I sigh with joy. ‘Ah,’ I think, ‘that is just perfect.’ It is a physical reaction when I feel my heart is singing.

Those are times I would save in a bottle if I could. All I can do is to save them in my memory or sometimes capture the moment on camera to remind me later. Those moments are the gardener’s adrenaline, in a low-key sort of way. We know that the scene will change – very rapidly if it is dependent on a particular quality of light, a couple of weeks if it is dependent on recent garden maintenance, more slowly if it is a case of a composition of plants that works brilliantly for part of the season.

Gardening could be likened to a journey with no set destination but plenty to see along the way. If you are goal-oriented, you may be better to take up golf. Or mosaic-making.

May your gardening year have moments of utter magic, joy and contentment that you, too, wish you could bottle and save.

Postscript: We once, and only once, visited a garden that on the day we went was as close to perfection as we have ever seen. It was a private garden in the Cotswolds, UK, and it remains fresh in our memory years later. https://jury.co.nz/2017/07/31/a-perfect-garden/