Word: garden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sooner or later, if they keep at it, the new gardeners discover what the others have known all along: the satisfactions have little to do with anything they can read, buy or brag about. "A garden is for its owner's pleasure," advised that wise, earthy doyenne of English gardening, Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), "and whatever the degree or form of that pleasure, if only it be sincere, it is right and reasonable, and adds to human happiness in one of the purest and best of ways...
...haven't felt so worked out in years," smiles the willowy Twinka Thiebaud, a caterer in Los Angeles who abandoned her mountain bike and health club when she was told that gardening might work just as well. Unlike a jog or a sit-up, she found, gardening is a purposeful exercise, a lung-cleaning, muscle-toughening activity that also decorates her house and stocks her pantry. "Every visit to the garden is the same," she says. "I'm just wiped out in a wonderful...
...kneeling and digging and weeding seems to have an equally salutary effect on the human spirit. "He who would have beautiful roses in his garden," wrote the great rosarian Samuel Reynolds Hole in 1869, "must have beautiful roses in his heart." To wait as long as three years for trilliums to bloom requires considerable fortitude; to rise early and weed builds discipline; to construct a garden in one's mind in the dead of winter fosters purity of thought. "Sometimes what you do is for others," muses Designer Oscar de la Renta, who has transformed a Connecticut horse farm into...
...those with such an eye to history, the garden represents a chance to create something that lasts. In the late Middle Ages, when plague ran rampant through Europe, explains Historian Barbara Tuchman, survivors feared that the wilderness would return because there would not be enough people alive to hold it back. "Gardening," she says, "is a ritual that responds to a desire in people to restore order." Even today she finds that the appeal of her own garden lies in a sense of permanence and renewal. "It says that everything is fine in the midst of chaos and bewilderment...
...these playgrounds provide a chance to cultivate memories, both of their childhoods and of their children. "Now I, like a lot of other boomers, have ended my prolonged adolescence," says Virginia Kempf, a housewife in Atlanta, "and am trying to re-create my childhood." Her father had a vegetable garden, and her mother grew irises. "Here I am, with a two- and a three-year-old, back at my origins." Many of her friends, she finds, are of the same mind. "They are tired of being self-absorbed. They want some roots, and they're realigning their values...