Fairy land

 

Come to the garden of many hues -

You will walk through colours of distant lands,

As if by magic, summoned together

By garden-fairies, their blossom wands

 

The hydrangeas, maples, rhododendron souls,

Huddle in the Valley of the many ponds,

The deciduous turn all autumn-wise

Their souls are greyed in aging fronds

 

 The zinnias, poppies, lupins bloom

Throughout the year, as seasons turn,

The waterlilies inspire, pastel muse –

Come, be a Monet, it’s not hard to learn

 

The hedges, the maze, the waterfall-bridge

Assembled all like a jigsaw art,

Every step, in beauty sings

Wherever you end, that’s where you start

 

We mortals too can make a fairy land,

Oberon himself – wouldn’t he be proud?

Titania too, would not be far,

Dreaming perhaps in midsummer’s shroud

 

Come then Hermia, Helena and all,

Where else would you rather yearn to be?

In Mayfield’s Eden in the tablelands,

There’s love-in-idleness wherever you see…

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The above lines are written in dedication to the Mayfield Gardens near Oberon in the Greater Blue Mountains region which is consistently rated as one of the most impressive gardens in New South Wales. Once known as Bullock Flat, it was renamed to Oberon in the 1860s, after the King of the Fairies in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. In what would be a litterateur’s dream, a neighbouring village was thereafter renamed to Titania, Queen of the Fairies.