New Gardening Eyes

The thing about going through the Master Gardener course is it makes you look at the same old things with new eyes. I find myself not only passing trees and shrubs on my own bit of earth with a new sense of curiosity – what the dickens is that dark spot on the trunk? Why is the woodpecker in the middle of the ancient Yew? –but the trees and plants and critters I’m blasting past along the highway. These new eyes, coupled with learning, make the whole experience of walking through the landscape denser, more in-depth. Instead of it being a Gainesborough painting, all soft edges and pastoral blends, it looks more like a panoramic three-D movie shot with plots and subplots in dialed-up multichrome as though the scales have fallen from my eyes. A richer life at a time when a lot of us are feeling a little poor. Not a bad investment.