In April 1999, during Historic Garden Week in Virginia, the Governors Garden Club enjoyed a few days touring. I’ve been looking through the photograph album I created after that trip where I added a lovely poem to this album. I know why I took the time to copy the poem on a scrap of paper in my purse that lovely day. I love garden gates! I often think of them as metaphors; to be willing to step through a ‘gate’ into what lay ahead. There is a scene in my novel, Greening of a Heart, where a garden gate is installed. That particular gate was the entrance into a potager, important to the Vicarage garden in the story. Come with me now, in our imaginations, let us step into the garden of our dreams after reading this inscription.
Inscription for a Garden Gate
Pause, friend, and read before you enter here
This vine clad wall encloses holy ground.
Herein a mellowed garden dreams away the years.
Steeped in serene, sweet light and muted sound.
Here tranquility and peace abide,
For God walks here at cool of evening-tide.
Pause, friend, and strip from out your heart
All vanity, all bitterness, all hate.
Quench, for this hour, the fever of your fears.
Then, treading softly, pass within this gate
There, where the ancient trees wait, hushed and dim,
May you find God, and walk a while with Him.
Pearl Council Hiatt
What a lovely poem.
Hi Rosie: I appreciate your reading the posts and letting me know when you ‘like’ them. I try to do the same for you because I know how nice it is to find that someone? is reading our work. A lovely network of writers who can’t help but write. Consider me here cheering you on.
There is something about garden gates! I love them too. Our POA restricts what kind we can have so nothing creative here, but the pause before stepping through a gate is still magical.
I think you and I should go on a garden gate quest and spend an afternoon with our cameras and finding a little magic.