Undo stress, ease your heart: your moment of Zen

February 8 2009, by Joyce Schneider

Stress isn't good for us, not for heart nor body. So take a moment to gaze into a beautiful garden, so hypnotically gorgeous that it seems like another planet. This one, pictured, is in southern France, in Provence. It was begun by a brilliant, exhuberantly creative woman named Nicole de Vesian, at the age of sixty-nine. Nicole was probably better known as the main innovator of Hermes; her assistant was the future fashion superstar designer Christian Lacroix.

During the tumult & competitition of Paris fashion life, she discovered that the "only way to get my heart to slow down" was to garden. In fact, she found her most special contentment just sitting, clipping with infinite patience at boxwood, one shrub after another. Often she'd even use her manicure scissors. "C'est hynotique," she'd say. Christian Lacroix loved it there, and loved helping. Many a Hermes scarf bears the curled forms of this fabulous boxwood garden.

At the age of 79 Nicole was still digging, planting, and clipping. She called her garden -- not Hermes -- her greatest achievement. Did she mind the aches that came with her passion?

Hardly. At 23, a single mom with two little kids, she'd fled the Nazis on a bicycle. She was a tough, gorgeously creative woman.

   1 votesEmail this | Bookmark