There are places and moments in which elevated feelings flourish, insightful thoughts flow, and and inspiration grows.
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Chinese proverb
Delicious solitudes.
Libraries and gardens, which have so much in commun, are some of those places. Their quiet atmosphere promotes a serene and meditative state of mind in which one can reconnect with what’s essential. Where common noise is put on mute, simple truths – which always whisper – can be heard.
The library – a garden of thought, and the garden – a library of natural wonders provide wholesome nutrition to mind and soul, help them expand and thrive.
With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.
Lope de Vega
And then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
Vincent van Gogh
In such peaceful environments sensory cues become more salient and more meaningful. The quality of light, the vibrancy and shades of colors, gentle sounds and scents permeating the air all bear witness to the simple beauty of what is.
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B. Yeats
The garden I love more than any place on earth; it is a better study than the room inside the house which is dignified by that name. I like to pace its gravelled walks, to sit in the moss-house, which is warm and cozy as a bird’s nest, and wherein twilight dwells at noonday; to enjoy the feast of colour spread for me in the curiously-shaped floral spaces. My garden, with its silence and the pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and trees nature takes me into her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man. It is curious, pathetic almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. Is the fancy too far brought, that this love for gardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that remote time in the world’s dawn when but two persons existed—a gardener named Adam, and a gardener’s wife called Eve?
Alexander Smith