Welcome to my garden...of china plates.
Why do beautiful vintage dishes fit so well into a garden landscape? The answer is simple; each china pattern is itself like a flower, beautiful and unique.
Years ago when folks accidentally broke dishes, the shards often got buried in the back yard, tossed down the privy, or into a nearby river.
Nowadays when I happen across an orphaned shard in the dirt, chipped and dirty with earth, I instinctively wipe off the soil and inspect it and try to identify the pattern. Sometimes I can tell what it is, and sometimes the pattern remains a mystery. But there is magic in those shards, the painted blue on white or speckled with worn pink roses. I imagine where it came from, who owned it, how it broke, what kind of food it once held.
Our dishes become such a personal thing, especially when we are growing up, or looking back on times past, on loved ones now gone who once shared their dishes with us too.
There's a very personal connection we have with dishes, and china patterns. They are like a sort of link between us and family, our homes, and our traditions. Small links of lives.
So finding an orphaned china shard holds magic for me, because it is like finding a piece of a broken link. A link between folks long, long gone, and times long forgotten. But the shard remains.
Maybe I should toss it back into the garden. It fits well there, a resting place for old, long forgotten china, with long forgotten connections.
Happy summer,
Laura
