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The crabapple tree was raining fruit on our vehicles. It had to go. We had two trees in the yard and the decision was made to terminate the one closest to the driveway. I asked my nephew Ben to come and help with the demo process.
Ben brought his girlfriend and his chainsaw in the summer of 2014 and we all worked to process the tree. I remember him asking me how much of a stump he was to leave. I told him to leave it around four feet. My thought was... 'I'll think of something to do with it.'
That stump was a bird feeder for a couple of years after it was cut.
In the summer of 2017 it found a different purpose. I needed a place to honour Ben who had died in January in a tragic vehicle accident. Ben wasn't a gardener or a flower child of any kind. The garden was my expression, my need, my space to dwell. I needed to wrap that stump that Ben had given me with an array of beauty and fragrance. So I created the Ben Garden.
The second year, I was chopping down another tree in my yard and used part of that cut to fashion an identifier for him in the garden.
Every year, the floral array changes. The video at the beginning of the post shows the various selection of blooms that made their way into the garden. I still used the post as a bird feeder the first year and I had some volunteer sunflowers show up adding some great sunshine to the collection.
It took a few years before there was an official resting place, and so this garden became that place for me to go and dwell.
(the poem I wrote about the Ben Garden)
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” — Pierre Auguste Renoir
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