With gardening in mind

 I've always been a great believer in fate, coincidence, serendipity, call it what you will. I also believe deeply that you can make your own luck with positive thinking. Or maybe I'm just a glass half full type of girl and see everything that happens in the way I want to see it happen. Who really knows.... but here's a great example.......

In yesterday's post I received a printed postcard from Fiona and Barry, letterpress printed on their own equipment. The new year greeting on the reverse is accompanied by some fabulous plant related Australian stamps. As he handed it over, our postie - who had obviously read the greeting - said what a great thing it was to receive. He was so right.  I have long been drawn to Fiona's blog and her passion for books, prints and the written word and she was uppermost in my thoughts when I later went in to the local 'books for free' shop yesterday afternoon.

 I genuinely believe that I must have had thoughts of letterpress and typefaces at the forefront of my mind as I just walked over to an overflowing box of distinctly old books and found the signwriting and advertising books immediately. Now is that fate or is it  not? The other little book is destined to get its covers used on a special project but I've started reading it and it is entrancing so it is reprieved for the moment.

 There are some wonderful illustrations in the advertising book and the signwriting one has got me practising the drawing of shadow capitals everywhere. Then I realised that this book linked in to another thing that had arrived via e mail  this week. As a long time recipient of the Uppercase magazine newsletter there was a link in the latest one to German calligrapher Nicole Sprekelmann, who, alongside her writing, draws into a mindfulness journal. If you take a look at her website on the blog page you will see what I mean.....

 .... and it was seeing Nicole's drawings that made me think about mindfulness too. It's a word we cannot escape from these days. I was even given a book about mindfulness drawing for Christmas and whilst making this year's plans for our garden this week I found these lines from Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden' written in 1681:

Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness:

The Mind, that Ocean where each kind

Does streight its own resemblance find,

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other Worlds, and other Seas:

Annihilating all that's made

To a green Thought in a green shade.

 

 Now I call that fate that I should come across a quote in my reading that is so relevant to my thinking that day. So much so that is spurred me on to make a book that will record all the thoughts and plants and ideas that will be garden specific this year. I'd seen a book online and had no idea how to make it but tried out a few ideas and now have the perfect place to keep ideas and write plant combinations or draw things.

And the first thing to put in my book is my card from Australia. Folded neatly it announces the date and when the page is turned shows off the gorgeous plants on the stamps it came with. So, fate or coincidence or serendipity.... the right thing came at the right time for the right idea. I call that perfect.