Stark Beauty

We all have images inside our head of things that we find the most beautiful: our favorite flower, a painting that makes us catch our breath and stand mesmerized, a memory of a gorgeous sunset. When I think of an ideal garden, for instance, I think of the lush gardens I saw in front of country cottages in small villages in England many years ago. Of course the gardens got that way because it rains in England. A lot. Almost all the time, in fact. Or at least sometimes it seems that way. I’d love to reproduce just such a garden in my own backyard. But I have something of a problem: Southern California is in the midst of a severe drought. So if I am going to rip up the small patch of grass in my backyard for anything, it has to be for the purpose of replacing it with drought tolerant plants. Sigh. Drought tolerant plants do not fit my definition of “beautiful backyards.” At all. But as I have been walking around the neighborhood with my camera over the last month or so, I have begun to notice just how beautiful such plants can be. They don’t fit my preconceived notion of beauty. But there is nothing like a camera lens to help you focus on things that you might otherwise pass by. And pretty soon you realize that you are noticing the unusual texture of bark, or of a rock. Or that the light is hitting an ordinary leaf at just the right angle to make the leaf translucent. And you can never look at the world in quite the same way again, because you begin to see that everything is made up of small pieces of unique beauty. One day you look at a cactus growing in the midst of rocks and realize that it is starkly beautiful. Although I’m still not sure I want to plant it in my backyard.