This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
While parking around the corner from my favorite coffee hangout, I noticed this garden in the front yard of a cottage. There are many such gardens in Berkeley, celebrating the luxuriant overgrowth of foliage. These "jungle gardens" (my name for them) are so wild that one is never sure that they were intended to look that way, or they are simply neglected. Neglect, however, when it comes to gardens which don't relay on artificial nurture, is not really neglect, but delegation of horticultural responsibilities to Mother Nature.
Monet's gardens in Giverny, Normandy, at least the wet parts, share the spirit of the Berkeley jungles. Blogger and software revolutionary Mark Bernstein has written about the distinctions and similarities between gardens and farms, parks and wilderness.
Dionysos, Greek deity of wine and wild women, was also seen as the god of wild vegetative growth, who wore a crown of ivy and carried a fennel stalk tipped with a pine cone. I think he would have felt at home in Berkeley's jungle gardens; maybe he still does.—JDL
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