The role of ‘Homes & Garden’ in a seasonal artistry

As a person of words, I was inspired some years ago to think in those terms as I reflected on the lush form of literature that thousands of amateur soil poets produce for our suburbs every spring and summer.

“This variation on the Circle of Life,” I wrote, “ … produces diverse and telling summer reading, with its own special power to enlarge the soul.”

This year, it is more visual imagery that has captured my thoughts as I begin to see the stunning variety of colors and designs popping up in suburban yards and throughways all around us. I am no less bound to sense notes of Hemingway or Pynchon or Dickenson or Vonnegut in the beauty that seems so casually to call to us from all directions, but for whatever reason, I’ve been more inclined toward thoughts of Rembrandt or O’Keefe or Seurat or Pollock.

Perhaps some of this inclination traces to the fact that so many artists take plants and flowers for their subjects, but it is not what they paint that invites comparison but what it does. Whatever the metaphor, this is indeed a wondrous time in our neighborhoods, and I bow in constant awe and appreciation to the countless everyday artists whose hours of turning spades, kneeling in dirt, pinching off dead heads and exploring crowded garden centers decorate our towns. They turn our visual landscapes into true galleries of comforting familiarity and delightful surprise.

Here we see strokes of the common — ferns, roses, hosta, daisies, marigolds, peonies. There explode bursts of the singular — clematis, hydrangea, salvia … or the occasional injection of the exotic with names like hyssop, dogbane, coreopsis, coneflower, mountain mint.

Perhaps there are no limits to the sources that stir these painters to make a canvas of their yard, but one that surely can contribute is our Sunday Homes & Garden section. Here they find, as in last week’s edition, for example, the importance of a “trunk flare” when planting trees, the finesse of the “Chelsea Chop” or the need to give succulents their alone time. A calendar of events directs them to garden-club activities and local plant sales.

Every week is its own compendium of information and ideas, contributing to the visual delights that don’t just brighten our neighborhoods but infuse them with a glorious spirit.

For those of us interested in the sumptuous, major attractions like the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe or the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, of course, offer awe-inspiring displays of their own. But it is a particular point of pleasure to me — as one person who could no more nurture a common tulip to life than produce a stunning da Vinci landscape — that I can get uplifted and inspired by the artistry on display wherever I go, in every pocket and corner and streetscape of the suburbs.

Thank you to them all.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.