We garden by imagining future moments and then making the arrangements, which involve thoughts about soil, sunshine, water, seasonal changes, and the nature of the plants that will play their part. Creation is never ex nihilo, though it does involve our power of speech, which is our power to bring an order that we have imagined into being.

The delphinium exists in a spot that is sheltered from wind. It gets nine hours of sunshine on a typical June day, though a few feet in every direction gets much less because of the shade of various trees and hedges. The spot gets shadier in the afternoon, when the sun is blocked by massive cottonwoods to the west.

The plant is supported by a 42-inch cylinder of net wire, no longer visible because the plant has grown through it. In early spring, I added two inches of compost as a top dressing. Since the plant began making the tall spikes a few weeks ago, I’ve watered it by hand with a hose, dousing the roots but not getting the flower spikes wet. When they get wet, the hollow stalks fall over and break at the top of the wire cylinder, which is only half as tall as the plant.

Delphiniums are not drought tolerant, and if the soil dries out they begin dying. Last summer, they needed water while in full flower, so I tried watering them with a sprinkler that made a soft mist instead of the impact sprinklers I normally use, which cover large areas but can be brutal on delicate plants. It didn’t work. The sprinkler was gentle but the water didn’t weigh any less, and the flowers began flopping over. I turned off the water and began installing individual stakes for each spike. This year, I was m ore careful. An unanticipated rain would wreak considerable havoc, creating a moment quite unlike the one I imagined. But it’s been a very dry summer.

The garden is a symphony of moments, of varying duration, many of them planned but some of them wild surprises. Each moment reveals a host of patterns, which we see in our mind’s eye. The moments are fleeting though in and endless succession, but the patterns remain in our minds forever, and we link them to other patterns, and as consciousness expands we see the patterns themselves forming larger patterns. The logos is a marriage of reality and consciousness, which are not two different things. And though very little of what happens is caused by me, what is happening does require constant care, which is not a problem. It is the real work. It is what God does, he says.