An early spring, abundant sun and ample rain work together this year. Lillian's garden grows lush.  Every day I discover new characters as the drama unfolds with complexities and nuances sown over the century. Discarded needles, dry and brittle, litter the earth beneath a grey hulk of a conifer that stands at the east end of the side garden. I thought the tree died with Lillian last year, but tiny pink blossoms, like soft petalled pine cones, burst from every twig as the tree awakens to its final year. Beneath it, huge leaves of rhubarb unfurl to the sun. Nestled between the dining room wall and the wooden shelter of the basement stairwell grows a seven foot rhododendron. Its green leaves sagged and rose as the cold of winter fought on and off over the past month. Huge buds, scaled like an armadillo or a pangolin, poise at the end of each branch. The scales swell as life inside develops. When I first glimpse crimson escape the clutch of a bud's green fist, I realize the need to preserve Lillian's garden and document it in paint. 

     Inside the barn waits a length of linen, luxury reserved from a bridal shower gift I gave to Colina last year. I kept the linen like a dirty secret, feeling guilty for not giving Colina the entire roll. It fits that I paint Lillian's English garden on linen. I find garden stakes that Lillian bundled with baling wire and stacked against the back wall of the barn. The stakes supported perennials, tomatoes and beans. Now I bevel and cut the dried lengths of wood, then build them into stretchers to support the linen ground of my paintings.  I aspire to paint every plant and flower that blooms in Lillian's garden this summer.

     The responsibility to perpetuate the gardens' existence spurs me into a furore of creative energy. The responsibility inspires me through a series of nine small paintings that record the rhododendron buds as they open into face sized blossoms. The pressure to document nature imprinted by humanity, evidence of Lillian's life and labour of love, builds, until each painting becomes a trial. Each new flower challenges me to capture it before the petals fade and fall to the ground. I barely catch the last blooms of crimson poppies, five crepe-paper flowers on furry stems, surrounded by pods that never open. Quickly I sketch in all five forms. I go back to fill in the details but I can't follow my sketch. Then I realize that the petals of one blossom have fallen while I worked, leaving a black rimmed shell. 

     Mid-May I give up. The extreme highs of creation and aesthetic response topple over into despair. I succumb to reality. I cannot preserve the life that grows around me. I can't even simulate it. My paintings hang dry and lifeless on a white-washed partition inside the barn.