At home in nature or nature at home?

Sunlight filtering through leaves throws shadows on a moss-covered rock, making it look upholstered, like a comfy pouf I could put in my living room, but that would be a mistake: the fabric-like pattern depends upon a specific set of circumstances that would be impossible to recreate indoors. And so I appreciate the rock but leave it sitting where it belongs.

Lately I've been reminded of Gene Stratton Porter, the author of The Girl of the Limberlost and other best-selling novels in the early years of the twentieth century, who, in her fiction and many magazine essays, promoted an aesthetic diminishing the distance between people and nature. She loved to create outdoor "rooms" dissolving the walls that separate us from nature, and she loved to bring nature indoors by filling her homes with moth collections and woodwork intricately carved with leaves and owls and other woodland creatures. Every time I've walked through her houses, I've wondered how many trees she had to sacrifice to demonstrate her love for trees. And once her former gardener told about a time when Gene wanted to create a beautiful display of trilliums around a rotting log, so she set the gardener to work transplanting the delicate flowers, causing him to remark upon the massive number of man-hours required to make a spot in the woods look "natural."

My personal aesthetic is more aesthetic; all I require is that every room in the house have some spot of beauty on display: an interesting fabric, a photo of grandkids or birds, a pretty shell, a bit of needlework. That sun-dappled stone I saw in the woods makes me want to find a fabric that recreates the effect, but I'll leave the stone itself where it belongs, in a dynamic, fluid environment. Who knows what it will look like next time I visit? 

Shadows on a rock.

Lovely Lake Katharine

See the face?

Bigleaf mangolia trees stretch far overhead

I love the way the light dapples the water