December 2005 © Janet Davis
This is the time when those “best of the year“ lists appear like clockwork in magazines and newspapers. For many of us, it’s also a time to reflect on our own special memories of the year. As a gardener and nature-lover, I treasure three vivid images from 2005, each of which embodies its own lesson or truth.
Water: 
In April, a friend and I took a week-long photography trip to southern California, wending our way from the thirsty Mojave Desert to the top of a wind-swept mountain near Santa Barbara. Everywhere we went, there were spectacular carpets of brilliant spring blossoms, courtesy of the heavy winter rains that had soaked deeply into the dry soil and awakened a bonanza of long-dormant seeds. As with all spring wildflowers (including the trilliums and hepaticas that briefly light our own forests), this beauty is ephemeral, a brief sprint from bloom to seed while temperatures are cool and the soil is moist and nourishing.
On our first morning in California with the entire desert floor of Saddleback Butte State Park thrillingly to ourselves, we stood gazing out at a vast golden sea of Bigelow’s coreopsis, studded here and there by silky white dune primroses, pink sand verbena and Joshua trees. It was a magical sight, given the fact that in some dry years there is little or no bloom in the desert and that in a few short weeks, all would be parched and barren here again.
It made me wish everyone could see the desert in bloom just once in their lives, if only to understand the phenomenal power of water to draw life from the most inhospitable of the earth’s landscapes.
Work:
We often use the analogy of art or painting
when 
describing garden-making and it seemed perfect for the beautiful
Ontario garden I photographed over two scorchingly hot days in August. I’d timed the shoot carefully to capture
peak bloom in the sunny, 4-acre prairie the owners had grown from seed, using a
palette of tens of thousands of native grasses and wildflowers. Included were ratibida, sweet coneflower,
echinacea, blazing star, goldenrod, monarda, beardtongue, rattlesnake master
and big bluestem.
As I searched out the best vantage points from which to capture the scene, I thought for the hundredth time about the tremendous amount of work the best gardeners undertake to carry out their visions in leaf and blossom, texture and line. And they do that even though (returning to the art analogy) a garden is but a temporary masterpiece, a delicate canvas that can be quickly ruined by weeds, wildlife, weather or time.
So when the moment is picture-perfect, as it was in this sunny garden on that perfect summer morning, I offer thanks to the artist who dreamed it, and I salute the hard, hard, work that sustains it.
Whimsy:
My final 2005 memory is of a drizzly
September morning on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, as I wandered through the
garden of renowned concrete artists George Little and David Lewis (see www.littleandlewis.com). Their work has been much celebrated
recently in scores of magazines and in their 
own book A Garden Gallery (Timber Press 2005). And their installations appear in gardens
throughout the U.S., including the fabulous Heronswood Nursery nearby.
Had it not been for the rain dripping from
the leaves that reminded me that this was indeed the Pacific northwest, it was
easy to imagine I was in
an ancient Greek ruin. For the columns,
fountains and frescoes on display -- all colour-washed in Mediterranean hues –
seemed to have been unearthed in some archaeological dig rather than fabricated
in the modern studio at the back of the property.
Set in a framework of lush, tropical foliage and blossoms, the garden revealed itself in a series of charming and often witty vignettes: a turquoise basin of succulents here; a spouting Zeus face there; a Doric pergola in Aegean blue; a nest of feather grass bearing birds’ eggs made from gazing globes, a nonsense rhyme laid out on the grass in a carpet of black and white tiles. As I gazed at the topiary-tree fountain weeping its leafy baby’s tears, it occurred to me that most of us take our gardens much too seriously. Indeed, we could all take a lesson in whimsy from George Little and David Lewis.
So there you have it. Water, work and whimsy. Oh yes – and wonderful, too!