The weather has not been especially conducive to tasks in the garden this week. Temperatures have remained low, giving our first proper frost on Monday night which immediately put paid to the dahlias; fortunately I had brought the pelargoniums, fuchsias and nerines inside earlier that day. Then today, nearly but not quite thwarting my plans to lift the dahlias, there have been a series of short and very heavy showers; the job was done, however, and seeing bare soil in much of the cutting beds has brought on the urge for some major clearing – weather permitting of course!
The weather was a little better last weekend, however, when the peace pole was finally erected in the woodland.
The first ‘peace pole’ I ever came across was the particularly loquacious example at Waterperry Gardens, but it wasn’t till Sandra included a small version in an IAVOM post in August that I considered creating one in our own garden. The basic concept of the pole is to promote peace by displaying the message ‘May peace prevail on earth’ in a different language on each face of the pole, usually but not always a four sided one. With a translation into every language under the sun readily available on the internet, there was much dithering before the project could actually start.
My first decision was to shorten the phrase so less lettering would be involved – and in an ideal situation peace would prevail not just on earth but on a personal level in our hearts and minds too. I chose my four languages – you can see English and Latin here – but I wrestled for quite some time with a decision between the alternatives of carving the text, or painting it. Carving would bring with it the possibility of unrecoverable mistakes (and would take much longer), whilst mistakes in painting could be painted out and this is the option I went for. Having decided that an irregular mix of upper and lower case would look less formal, the letters were spaced and marked out in a very soft pencil so they could be easily erased after painting. Once painted, it was erected in the woodland where it can be seen from different sides depending on which path was traversed – and all we need now is for that ever-elusive Peace to prevail…