Tag Archives: garden of hope

A Virtual Garden

Virtual Garden, In Ithaca, New York, Robin Botie, blogger and Photoshopper, photographsin multiples a friend in the garden room at Longview, an Ithacare Community.The yellow flowers quivered as I plopped the small plant into the hole I’d dug. I tamped the soil down around it. Done. Thankfully there had been no run-ins with earthworms. No bugs.
“I can water it myself,” my friend says.

“So what’s this virtual garden you keep talking about?” she asks.
“Well, it’s going to be a place online, on my website’s Home Page actually. Soon, people can go there and if they email me a picture of their loved one who died, I will Photoshop the face into a flower in the garden.”
“But why a garden?” my friend asks. “You say you don’t like gardening.”
“Because gardens are comforting places. Healing places. I like gardens. Being in them, seeing the colors, watching things grow. I just hate weeding and worms and getting dirt in my fingernails.”
“But that’s half the fun,” she says. And then my friend asks, “Can I give you a picture of (my husband) and have you put him in your garden?”