And one is nearer to others, as well.

"One is nearer God's heart in a garden than anywhere else." I love that saying. And I love that sign, and I am sure that I would love the garden it appears in, as well.

The garden that sign is located in is Benton County's First Rain Garden, in Benton County, AR. Benton County has it's first rain garden because of Fiskars, which every year awards the Project Orange Thumb Grant to more than 10 applicants, giving the applicants money to create a community garden.

All gardening is healthy and nurturing and good for you and the environment. But a community garden is something more: it brings together neighborhoods, it promotes unity and sharing and togetherness -- all good things. It gets people away from the TVs and computers and offices, and out into the fresh air, kneeling on the moist earth, gardening side by side and sharing efforts, stories, and lives.

Fiskars likes that, and I like it, too. And through "Project Orange Thumb," Fiskars is promoting even more than the togetherness and nature that comes from the community garden project. They are encouraging creativity, because gardening is like living art. When a gardener plants flowers, creates rain gardens, locates rocks and decorative grasses, edges beddings, that gardener (or gardeners) are expressing themselves creatively in a way that has to be seen, experienced, to be understood: They create a living work of art that changes over time.

It will change over a course of hours, as flowers bloom in the morning and go back to sleep at night.

It will change in the course of weeks, as plants take root and begin to expand.

It will change in the course of months, as plants grow taller and as the seasons change and leaves turn brown, giving way to the color of fall and the starkness of winter and the explosiveness of spring.

It will change in the course of years, as trees loom large and ivys spread out and flowers multiply and march on.

Gardens are unique to individuals, and when individuals join together to create a garden, the garden shows a little of the personality of everyone who touched it, and becomes something different every time. The Rain Garden in Benton County differs from the bridged garden Farias Garden in Houston, and they are not the same as the Bailey Peninsula created and maintained by high school students in Buffalo, New York.

Those projects also help build the communities they are in. They're used for education, and they beautify the cities, and they teach valuable skills to the people who work on them. And they do that all in a way that emphasizes creativity and effort.

When you look into a garden, you are looking into the minds of the people who worked on it at the same time as you are seeing the tangible results of those ideas. Fiskars knows that, and they foster developing those minds and those gardens, and, in turn, those communities that host the gardens.