Spring Bursting Forth in Gamble Gardens

I can’t help but be soooooo delighted when spring begins to awaken and it appears there is hope that this cold bitter winter has an end. On the way home from church on Sundays, we drive by a beautiful garden called the Elizabeth Gamble Gardens in Palo Alto. Quite often I ask my husband to pull over so we can check the progress of everything in the garden. I find great enchantment in seeing the tulip bulbs peaking out from the sea of dark soil and surveying the buds beginning to open on the magnolia trees. It makes me think of the poem Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

There is such a joy in experiencing the very first life of spring. That first leaf becomes far more precious against winter’s lifeless backdrop. With it, returns a hope that beauty will come forth and bless us again with spring. But there is also the understanding that this too must pass away. Everything living is temporal. So as a photographer, I find it my duty to capture that moment when life is created and is most beautiful!

Here are a few photos from my latest trip to Gamble Gardens when spring was just beginning to burst forth.

  

– Naphtalie Joy Joiner