Instant Happiness : Flowers, Apples, Peas, Potatoes, And Love
"The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command."
J.R.R. Tolkien
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While hobbit homes may be the place we often associate with happiness, it is definitely true that the little-folk find joy in the great outdoors. Gardens, fields, forests, green hills, are excellent places to find happiness. Anywhere and at any time of the year. Hobbits are in a unique relationship with nature. The hills and the forests hold memories of all that has happened to it. This landscape we call home is rich in history. The folk that came before us have shaped and formed the Shire we know today. And yet nature has its own way to reclaim the land in an ever changing cycle of death and rebirth as the seasons turn.
Sitting by a bubbling stream or in a little garden, we are so close to nature, there are no distractions, no luxuries, just a simple, slow, and rustic landscape able to fast-track to the natural meaning of hobbit happiness. On a sunny summer day imagine you are standing outside your round door, facing a beautiful yard surrounded by a low fence made of woven willow branches. Walk down the stone steps, and under an arbor thick with hanging roses. The garden is bathed in sunlight -- there are raised flower beds, and pots with growing things.
A bountiful vegetable patch is in the south corner, white flowers where potatoes are growing, and small structures constructed from wood, supporting beans and peas plants sneaking towards the blue sky. Purple beets poking from the dark soil, and tall sunflowers facing the path of the sun. At the end of the garden, on the northern side, a stone wall, where fruit trees have been trained to grow against it, to catch the heat radiating from the stones. Apples, pears, prunes, and cherries. In the air the happy sound of buzzing honeybees busy doing their work so essential to the hobbit gardener.
Hobbits are part of the natural world around them, it is hardly surprising that our relationship with our land and the earth is critical to who we are, and what it might be possible for us to become. It's in the natural landscape that we come face to face with the Earth to which we belong, and so hobbits' relationship to the land they inhabit is a fundamental and universal part of their journey in this world. To put it quite simply, we cannot be hobbit or even exist without the land. Our 'hobbitiness' cannot exist in isolation: it requires a context, and its context is the natural landscape that supports us.
I sit in my garden with my back against an apple tree, eating a slice of warm home-made bread with butter and strawberry jam, and I smile watching white fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and remember the wise words of Rufus Brightmore : “He who plants a garden plants happiness...life is short, you are here for a little visit. Don’t hurry, don’t worry, and be sure to smell the flowers, along the way.”
Photo taken by me in Hobbiton, New Zealand - edited and painted in Photoshop
