A visit to Crathes Castle Gardens in mid summer is always a feast of colour and abundance. There are wide cottage borders of flowers that have been decades in growing, the colours either blending or clashing, and the blooms planned so that throughout the summer there is colour coming or going. I enjoy the diversity, extravagance and multiplicity of such a long established garden; and then those moments when one particular flower invites and persuades attention.
That happened this morning. At Crathes there is a surfeit of colour and shape, contrast and complement, and it is easy to drift and meander, simply absorbing an environment created for pleasure. We had walked the paths, sat in the shaded seats, taken time to read the names of roses and thistles, trees and shrubs.
I had as usual spent some time at the poppies and meadow flower beds, taking photos which, however well they turn out, are always moments in time frozen for later consumption.
I've never quite reached that place described by Dorothy Frances Gurney, and reproduced in Garden Centre kitsch plaques, "One is closer to God in a garden, than anywhere else on earth." Maybe because as a child and into my teens, in my spare time I was often in greenhouses taking cuttings, growing geraniums, pellargoniums, and other house plants for sale; and my father kept a cottage garden capable of being honourably mentioned in any flower show. I got used to a garden as a work of art, and flowers as a contradiction that everything in life has to be utilitarian or made for a barcode.
But that said, Crathes Garden is a beautiful place to linger, and look, and listen, to the garden and to your heart. Walking out of the garden we came to some trees, amongst them a Japanese Kousa Dogwood in flower.
Unexpectedly, this flower invites and persuades attention. The flower is white, plain, four petalled, and the tree is covered by them, four petalled flowers, white, and cruciform. And it was that observation that made me stop, and look, and think the most obvious thought for a Christian looking at a cruciform flower. There in the delicate profusion of hundreds of flowers, the symbol of love, mercy, holiness, forgiveness, reconciliation and peace.
The connection once made, becomes a prayer, "the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." - "Love so amazing so divine, demands my love, my life, my all" - "We stand forgiven at the cross".
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