joy of nine9

1

Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden. 
Robert Brault

One is nearer God’s heart in a garden
than anywhere else on earth.
by Dorothy Frances Gurney

I always let my kids dig in the dirt with me, even if they pulled flowers instead of weeds. Now they all love gardening as much as I do. Gardening is a soothing, balm for my spirit. I can sense the Spirit of God permeating nature. In fact gardening is a prayer when we are quiet and listening. Perhaps most people also sense His life-giving presence in nature; that’s why so many love the outdoors, even if they are not especially spiritual.  As for us we are blessed to live on seven acres by a creek.  Much of it is still wild but I am slowly reclaiming more and more area, creating meandering gardens.

2

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
Genesis 2:15

Sometimes it occurs to me that I am fulfilling the edict from God to Adam and Eve to take care of the beautiful garden He had created on earth.

3

 “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.

For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him.

It “consents,” so to speak, to His creative love.

It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God,

and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.”  Thomas Merton

4

Little flower, but if I could understand what you are, root and all is all, I should know what God and man is.
Tennyson

Some of my floral delights

5

The best place to seek God is in a garden.
You can dig for him there.
George Bernard Shaw

I have pruned back 20 feet of sumac and buckthorn that had become invasive near our lane, across from the house .  After clearing away al the brush and cutting down the stumps I filled pails with soft white pine needles and spread them around as a free ground cover . Next I hauled rocks from  around our property and built low stone walls. After I  moved in some planters. I created.a garden delight. opposite the house, beside our long driveway.

 

6

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God.
Thomas Jefferson

I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God, it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.
 F. Frankfort Moore, A Garden of Peace

God almighty first planted a garden.
And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
 Francis Bacon

Working in the garden gives me something
beyond the enjoyment of the senses.
It gives me a profound feeling of inner peace.
 Ruth Stout

Almost any garden,
if you see it at just the right moment,
can be confused with paradise.
 Henry Mitchell

7

At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous.
Mirabel Osler