Stitching a Garden Tapestry

garden tapestry
like heavens’ embroidered cloths
stitched with childlike dreams

Linking to Ronovan’s haiku challenge with prompt words ‘star’ and ‘child’ and Sandra et al’s photo challenge word ‘stitch’. Thank you to all of them for setting the challenges and do check out their blogs to see the very different ways others have approached them.

This was a tougher challenge for me this week. Basing the haiku on the concept of a garden as a tapestry was my starting point and I knew I had this little embroidery which would fit the photo challenge. Stitched from a photograph of the herbaceous borders at Packwood House in Warwickshire during a period when I had time to sit and embroider (early 1990s, I think!), it measures only 2″ by 3″ and was one of several miniature embroideries I completed at the time, most based on photographs and each only taking a few hours. Much quicker to complete than the samplers which I also enjoyed stitching during that period!

‘Star’ and ‘child’ were much harder to incorporate – but that’s what makes it challenging – and I toyed with ‘childlike’ awe and wonder but struggled to accommodate anything star like and certainly not alternatives like ‘constellation’ and ‘firmament’ (allowable in the challenge as synonyms) which just had too many syllables. Finally, it was researching possible readings for Younger Daughter’s wedding that provided the solution, and I am grateful to WB Yeats for the inspiration which resulted a haiku which meets all the challenges as well as the ethos of my blog. My garden is indeed a tapestry, one which I am constantly stitching and weaving – and oh those dreams!