The song of the zen gardens

And what is art where to we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme---
When nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time? -- Rudyard Kipling

Welcome to my zen gardens. The above image is is what you first see as you approach my home near my front porch. The below image is the smaller pond next to my front porch. My husband and I built these ponds and gardens from scratch. I am the one with the ideas, the planner, the collector of rocks and statues...my husband is the muscle man, the mover, the hole digger and over all handy man.

Butterfly! These words
From my brush are
not flowers...
Only their shadows. -- Soseki

I think of gardening as an extension of one's being, something as deeply personal and intimate as writing a poem. --- Stanley Kunitz, poet

Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. --Crowfoot

This garden is no metaphor... more a task that swallows you into yourself, earth using, as always, everything it can. --- Jan Hirshfield.
(You are now in the back of the house which faces the cliff. There is a larger pond with very large koi which we have had for 10 years now.)

The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part plowman. He modifies the climate around his home. --- John R. Whiting

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy. -- Rumer Godden

A garden should be in a constant state of fluid change, expansion, experiment, adventure; above all it should be an inquisitive, loving, but self-critical journey on the part of its owner. --- N.E. Bates
My next post will feature my new greenhouse which I love and am very excited about.