How does your Thought Garden Grow?

Flowers, unlike the faces of human beings, appear to be the perfect size for imagining.

~Elaine Scarry, Reading by the Book

          This week I find myself with another reading I can relate to on a deeply personal level.  I grew up around plants my entire life, it's something that comes from being the granddaughter of a farmer and the daughter of a farm girl.  For many years I started my favorite annuals from seed on my windowsill: leggy, lacy bachelor's buttons; nasturtiums with their shield-like leaves and Nickelodeon-splat oranges; and most dear to me, the many-colored pompoms of zinnias, "Last Train to Lilliput" dwarf variety.  On certain summer days my mother would take my sister and I to the Michigan State University 4H Children's garden, which was my own equivalent of Narnia or the magical world of your choice.  Everything was beautiful and colorful, meant to be explored and enjoyed by people of my own age and height.  One bed in particular was a rotating "theme garden," that on one visit was a "wizard garden" devoted to plants with connections to Harry Potter and magic.  I planted my own version the next year, complete with a painted stake to label it.  It was my own place in the beds around our house and I felt proud of it.

          Years later with the wizard garden mostly left to attend to itself, the flowers around my house and around my life still thrive.  One of my biggest reservations about my family potentially moving to Minnesota was the thought of what would happen to the garden after we left. (We're not moving any more, thank goodness!)  We have a "green and white" shade garden on the east side of the house, complete with a Spartan helmet weathervane.  My beer-brewing dad grows hops on the trellis in the back garden, forming a gateway to the tomatoes, herbs, and zucchini we plant every summer to become caprese salad, chili sauce, and bread.  Three different varieties of lavender grow outside the front door, and my mother and I filled five-gallon buckets from my grandfather's peony bushes for my graduation party.

          All this means it makes beautiful sense to me that "flowers are the perfect size for imagining."  Flowers are small enough to be held in the hand but large enough to take up our whole attention when we so wish.  There are worlds of color and texture in a blossom, and the entire plant kingdom is so full of variety.  Reading this chapter, I couldn't help but try the thought experiments it suggests, imagining tiny horses and trees in my little finger or my forehead.  The wonderful thing about flowers and the imagination is that they can fit anywhere in the body you choose to imagine them, from a single lilac flower on the nail of your pinky finger to a stem of foxglove or delphinium as long as your arm.  Lose yourself in a flower and it can become a world, just as a book can.  Look close enough and think big enough, and the details can expand into amazing gradations of abstraction, like the famous works of Georgia O'Keefe. 

          The particular describability and imaginability of flowers makes them, I think, a perfect center for the focus and reverie of the mind we've talked about earlier in this class.  Scarry herself points out that poets often use flowers as springboards into more difficult imagery, as Proust used his madeleine to delve further into memory.  From botanical fireworks to mental gymnastics, how does your thought garden grow?