Save a Living Piece of Art

If you’re a gardener, you know the work what goes into creating a garden: Planning, planting, pruning, replanting, and weeding. It’s a true labor of love.

But even if you’ve never picked up a trowel or planted a seed, you can see that a beautiful garden is a work of art.

So it’s hard to understand why anyone would choose to destroy a great work of art. Would anyone destroy Monet’s paintings? Or allow the Louvre be demolished?

Of course, not. But a beautiful public garden in Bastad, Sweden, called the Norrviken Garden, is under threat of total destruction. I visited this garden several years ago and found it to be one of the most beautiful gardens in Europe (I also saw my first banana slug there!). Built in the early 1900s, this public garden was chosen as the most beautiful park in Sweden in 2006 and the second most beautiful park in Europe.

But now this elegant, fully-grown, century-old garden is going to be destroyed to make way for a large hotel, roads, parking areas, and a number of residential buildings.

BUT THERE IS A CHANCE TO SAVE THIS GARDEN. The Norrviken Garden Society, a non-profit association, is working to save the garden. You can help too, by signing a petition to stop the destruction of this garden. I just signed it and it was really easy--you don't even have to know Swedish ;-)

To read more about the petition, click here.

This is what social media is all about: You can live on a farm in Iowa and help save a garden in Sweden. Let's do it!