Apogee is a term that I heard often when I was much younger, when space exploration was new.  Rockets and satellites were often in the news.  The apogee was the maximum point of flight at which gravity would overcome the energy of momentum and the launch vehicle begins its reentry arc into the earths atmosphere.  Space, bent by the earth captures the rocket, and it falls.  –unless it has enough fuel to achieve escape velocity.

Apogee came to mind the other day while working in the yard.  A garden is a shaped environment, a joint work of man and nature.  The end of wildness, random growth, development at cross purposes, chaos, is contrasted by the boundaries and vectors provided by human intervention.  A garden is not the antithesis of wilderness.  It is the life force of the wild constrained by reason.

So here are a few images of my garden.  These images are of the summer apogee of a segment of nature.  These photos show nature at the climatic stage of summer development.  Some snap shots of the “rocket in flight” suspended, before it’s slow rotation and inexorable obedience to the force of gravity.  Yes, there is the apogee, the point of maximum development before the homeward

plunge to the embrace of mother earth, from

which it came.

We are of the earth, and it is sublimely right—that to the earth we should return.  May we save ourselves from attempting escape velocity from our home.