A garden is a lie.
Yes, it is pretty. Beautiful, even. Botany of all kinds collected in a single space and arranged in pleasing patterns for public enjoyment so one need not traipse through a forest on a long and wearying hike to see the wonders. (But oftentimes the long and wearying hike makes the wondrous sight all the more rewarding.)
In a garden that is cultivated by humans rather than Nature, one sees a rose’s lush velvet petals but ignores the knife-like thorns lurking beneath.
In the wild, one would see the rose and the stems, which would be curling around a nearby tree or maybe a section of crumbling wall of a forgotten cottage.
In a garden, the thorns are kept cultivated and small and out of sight so as not to distract from the flower’s color and shape and beauty. But then everything becomes dull and boring because there is no contrast; it is all just soft edges and velvety textures, color and sweet, fragrant smells all around, and the input of sensory information lacks enough distinction to be considered separate pieces of information, so the mind blurs everything together.
In the wild, plant and animal life are free to interact as Nature intended they should. The fragrance of the sweet-scented flowers is balanced out by the acrid and musky tangs of decomposition, excrement, and animals’ fur. The gently curving petals and pretty colors are offset by the sharper or more muted colors of the sticks and stones.
In a garden, the primary sound is that of visitors ooh-ing and ah-ing over the flowers and the click click of cameras, sounds that quickly become tiresome and distract from the beauty present.
In the wild, the main sounds are of the little and not-so-little insects that buzz as they go about their respective businesses; there are the distant and not-so-distant calls of mammals and birds that add different and far more interesting layers to the scene.
One does not realize how much a garden hides until one sees a garden that is cultivated by Nature and no other. Then their eyes open and they see truth (or a purer form of it, as truth is rarely distilled into simple terms and full purity).
A garden hides a great deal. It hides the thorns, the dangers, the unpleasant things. It hides everything the gardeners (or their employers) do not wish those who view the garden to see. It hides all the imperfections in the hope of making the final scene more perfect; yet by doing that, they do not realize they are making it worse because the imperfections help highlight the perfections.
While the majority of gardens can be forgiven for their deception since they aren’t hiding anything of true importance, a certain garden in a reasonably large city cannot be overlooked, for it obscures something of value.
But there is a problem now. While a non-wild garden is overseen by humans, Nature still has its say. It is as small as whether a rose has twenty or twenty-one petals, whether a vine of ivy creeps up a wall or not, whether a leaf falls today or tomorrow. So even though Nature is suppressed in human gardens, it still has enough influence to make finding what the garden hides more challenging. Bushes grow taller and bigger and denser, obscuring the object from sight; grass encroaches on the path leading to it, choking it off until it is no more; rain and wind erase and erode previous signs of the object’s existence. Humans pass through and leave their prints everywhere (and human prints stain for a long time).
So there is a problem. It has been so long that Nature and humans together (though by no means intentionally) have erased all signs of the object’s existence, and Time has done an excellent job of erasing memories. Because in the grand scheme of Life and Death, who would remember a plain wooden (or perhaps it was stone) door in a distant, rarely traversed corner of a garden?
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