Couple to be fined $500 a day for having a garden

[tblue37]

81. In our town (Lawrence, Kansas),

there is a house with a carefully designed and maintained front yard "habitat." The owner has clearly created the habitat to encourage wildflowers and small birds and animals. It is quite charming, but to the untutored eye it seems, as a girl in my class complained one semester, "sloppy."

I use the contrast between it and more manicured lawns and flower gardens to illustrate for my poetry students the different attitudes toward nature that dominated in the Romantic and Neoclassical periods.

The Neoclassical period (the Enlightenment) was concerned not just with studying and understanding naturer by way of science, but also with dominating its forces to turn them toward human needs and desires, including both the improvement of our material existence and the satisfaction of that aspect of our aesthetic sense that delights in order and control.

The Romantics, on the other hand, were inclined to see nature as the living garment of God--or of the divine in the mortal world if they were pantheists. They were inclined to revel in nature's untamed power and beauty, especially as manifested in its most sublime and overwhelmingly huge and powerful scenes and forces. But they also delighted in nature's smaller manifestations, as long as they were--well, natural.

I think the garden in the OP is lovely. I hope they get enough support now to challenge the city--and enough financial support to ride out the city's bullying.