Monet's light summer touches.

August is the time to stand still with nature and let your soul catch up with your body. For a gardener it is important not to forget to find that tranquility, the joy of gardening bringing to an end the Sisyphean tasks of spring and summer, as one Puritanical task relentlessly follows another. It is easy to forget to enjoy the fragrance of the Thyme, the touch of the Lemon Balm and the stature of the high flying Hollyhocks. There are sensuous pleasures in the taste of Blackberries melting in the mouth,the feel of freshly picked fruit,and the rustle of the wind in the trees that carries the swallows higher and ever higher.I took time out this weekend to enjoy the light touches of light, the lightness of being.

Gardening is not the action packed, quick fix, hormone driven, young man’s sport, though it may be an antidote to the aggression of one news programme after another . It is often where older people have much to give; even with poorer health and heavy with family tragedies there they can find and share solitude and solidarity with nature and friends. They may have words of gardening wisdom, fresh perspectives and mature insights.

A doctor suggested to an ageing Claude Monet that he could improve his eyesight with a cataract operation, he responded with a poem written in his garden in Giveny; he was sitting by his lily pond in what was quintessentially an idyllic summer country garden: Doctor, you say that there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don't see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe of objects that don't know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent.

The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and changes our bones, skin, clothes to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Claude Monet ........

If only the Houses of Parliament and politicians would dissolve night after night into the fluid Thames. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever: a pathway to heaven.

Alan Phillips

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