Staying in my room,
I thought of the new Spring leaves.
That day was happy.
Amy Lowell, Twenty-Four Hokku on a Modern Theme, from What’s O’Clock
And so the seasons go round and round, and spring comes again.
Swarthmore is an arboretum; more than four thousand distinct plant species call the campus home, many of which are identified and labelled for the convenience of the botanically-minded. The plant life, and, specifically, its seamless integration it is into every nook and cranny of the campus, makes Swarthmore one of the most beautiful colleges in the United States, and there are very few times that can compete with early Spring (though early winter might be my personal favorite).
I recently upgraded my phone for the first time in six years, and the difference in camera quality has been astounding; it’s as if I’ve been taking photos through dirty glass for half a decade. I decided to use this newfound power and document these burgeoning days of spring. I was not the only one with this idea; as I walked, there were probably hundreds of students all around the campus, playing, working, talking, and just doing nothing at all.
The ground flowers, out in full bloom, the stamens just beginning to unfurl from around the pistils. Little motes of color dotting the ground.
The arboretum maintains most of the popular spots for outdoor recreation and meditation on campus. My personal favorite is the koi pond; located near McCabe library, the paths are lined with paving stones and the benches are trellised so that vines hang down against your face. It is a miniature (the entire thing is probably less that 150 feet on any side) version of Eden, replete with the sounds and smells of nature. The filtration device is a sculpture of a cat tipping a jug off of the ledge (and out of the jug spills the clean water).
These are some of the animals I encountered, most of whom were too skittish to obtain a photo from any closer than twenty feet away. As such, most photos have an “evidence of Bigfoot” sort of vibe. I do feel like the squirrel in the first photo is majestically lit, though.
Flowering trees were tentatively opening up, still afraid of the possibility of a late frost. The cherry border, a walk lined with blooms, smelled like mulch and growing.
New plants shot out from the growths of the old, like toothpicks made of life spurting out of graves.
We are a busy species. It’s often hard to appreciate how lucky we are to live in such an amazing world, but I like to think that perhaps one leaves Swarthmore more appreciative of nature than when one came. The gardens are like concentrated pockets of the beauty of Spaceship Earth. Millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of cultivation, and hundreds of hours of gardening are packed into every flower, every bed, every tree, every grove.
There is so much beauty on every scale, as things bloom to life. From the small…
to the large…
to the macrocosmic.
