Opposites Attract?
If someone told me, when I woke up that morning, I'd be
watching an ad for a Chinese dance show over and over, and listening
intently to the Chicago song “25 or 6 to 4”, I'd have said,
“Yeah, could be. Why not?” I lead a quiet life, but it does get
strange sometimes.
To clarify, I was walking through a nearby mall and a
kiosk was set up to run an ad for a Chinese dance/acrobat show,
showing short clips of people jumping, thrusting with swords and
throwing things in the air. Simultaneously, the mall muzak was
playing the above mentioned song, which I like. The weird thing was:
the phrasing and emphasis of the song were in exact sync with
the video. I watched the tape run at least three times and the timing was
precise. It was really neat to see, though the cultural basis of the
two items were as different as [insert your own simile here]… And,
yet they worked together.
Married couples? Classic “opposites attract”. Not
always for always, but sometimes for always.
What could be more different than twisted hunks of
metal and soft, growing plants? I just saw a picture of a fine garden
in Delaware. A copper sculpture of a heron twisted elegantly upward
before a set of soft Japanese Maple leaves. They do go
together.
Garden gnomes have been overdone, but a small statue of
a smiling frog, in the lotus position, was great in a shady garden on
a recent Azalea Convention tour.
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| The Neckel Garden in 2015 demonstrates how plants and human constructions can go well together. |
On the counter-example side: we are so used to seeing
suburban houses that we don't think of them as piles of brick, wood,
aluminum siding and shingles. In the old days, my days, the metal
bars of TV antennas were the flag of the ugliness troops, but now
there are just some satellite dishes on the lookout, which don't look
quite as bad. And yet, we set out a small collection of trees and
bushes all around, then declare the constructed piles “attractive”.
Maybe, if the houses were made by Frank Lloyd Wright my sneers would
be misplaced. Everything else is just a rectangular pile with a
triangular pile on top.
The 'burbs are so much a part of our psychological
landscape we think the plants and construction mass are a happy pair.
No. Foundation plantings are just a desperate attempt to hide …
foundations. And, what is it about asphalt and asbestos covered
triangles perched above our houses that stir the heart's aesthetics?
Not all opposites attract. Most houses and their
plantings are thrown together by the fates, hoping to coexist for a
time, as cheek-by-jowl commuters on a Japanese subway. Anything a
gardener can do to ease the strain will lower the world's tension.
Maybe, raise plant societies to the Ambassadorial level??
