Nature is Imagination Itself


I love this precise moment of spring, the way that the budding leaves on the trees are so fresh and vital, their golden inflorescences draped from branches like showers of soft green foam.

The boughs in their shape come close to resembling the imaginary powder-puff trees of artists like Claude Lorraine and those early Australian artists who could only paint the bush containing the soft-leaved european trees of home rather than the alien, unknowable eucalypts. Either their minds could not yet accept what they saw before them, or perhaps they were just too lazy to learn how to paint these new trees, because maybe they had no imagination & didn't view trees as important in their own right, beyond being a useful method of framing a picture. It was William Blake who wrote

Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some
scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination,
Nature is Imagination itself.




On a side note - I typed '
inflorescence' into wikipedia to check I was using the right word, and was pleased to find that it is a sphere of information that contains many brilliantly obscure and wonderful sounding words. Ones I liked included:

peduncle

bract

involucre

sympodial

basipetal

axil

corymb

umbel

spadix

spathe

bostryx

thyrse



Have a good weekend everyone!




3 comments:

zmkc said...

I shall spend it with the dictionary, looking up that list of new words. Amazing how much language there is still to learn.

Gadjo Dilo said...

That Wikipedia entry on 'inflorescence' is pure botanical erotica, isn't it!

Susan said...

Yes, nature inspires works of artistic genius, curious words and all sorts of creative stuff .. and imagination is a natural wonder in itself. Lots to ruminate on here..