The big picture

This year, nature cut through the noise of modern life with quiet moments of pure joy, writes MICHAEL McCOY

In a world seriously lacking in silence and solitude, a mad, passionate love of plants and gardens gently ushered me, this year, into several moments so rich in both that I was almost brought to tears.

There was a sparkling day, back in the Italian summer, when I caught a chairlift up one of the impossibly lofty, chalk-white peaks of the Dolomites. The ascent was a floral tease. Orchids appeared, and purple flower spikes I couldn’t identify. I was concerned that I was missing too much – that I should have walked up instead. But then I stepped off the chairlift and into a scene so outrageously picturesque, so loaded with blooms, so free of any polluting intent or ego of a designer, yet looking so ‘gardened’, so loved, so nurtured, that I welled up in response to the glory of it all.

Demanding attention, and insisting on being the centrepiece of every photo, was a huge natural tower of rock puncturing, with vertical assurance, a velvety green meadow on a steep slope. The foreground was splashed with egg-yolk orange from an immense sweep of trollius, whose multilayered, buttercup-like blooms make a perfect globe. Having struggled to grow them (back in the days when I measured my gardening prowess by how well I fought and won unnecessary horticultural battles), I was floored by the apparent effortlessness of the display. It wasn’t solid colour. The spheres of gold hovered above grass level in random patterns of density and diffusion, like a murmuration of starlings. In the background, at the base of the monolithic tower, and in a visual whisper, wild geraniums studded the grass.

Further exploration uncovered other joys, the grandest of which were gentians of eye-popping blue, and deep maroon martagon lilies at that point of bloom perfection when three or so open flowers are crested with heavily pregnant buds in artfully descending size.

In total contrast, months later, I was splitting firewood on an evening of extraordinary stillness at the bottom of my own property, where my garden attention runs thin, and which forms the base of a shallow valley or bowl on the side of which the property sits. There’s something about the downward-facing necessity of this job, and the very intentional focus on the spot you’re aiming at with the splitter, that recalibrates your field of vision, so that when I stopped, momentarily, and looked up, the sky above and the space around felt mysteriously, and wonderfully, magnified. The break in the blows also amplified the silence, and I felt I was seeing and hearing in a whole new way. Eternity yawned in that momentary pause.

There have been many such moments in 2019. I had no idea, back at age 17 when gardening ‘got’ me, that I’d stumbled on the near-perfect antidote to the toxicities and deficiencies of modern life. Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au