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#2134 -
This
issue brings you selections from a new edition of Why
We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place, by Jim Nollman.
As with many features in The Nondual
Highlights, it is an exclusive. Reprinted with
permission.
Read more and order the book at http://www.sentientpublications.com/catalog/garden.php
Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense
of Place
by Jim Nollman
To succeed at gardening, we must all learn
the difference between pure aesthetics on the one hand and the
good health of place on the other. This sense is not defined in
any gardening encyclopedia or in any scientific treatise about
the senses. We don't necessarily think about it, and there even
seem to be limits to how much we can study up on it. It is
eventually understood on its own behalf. When that occurs, this
so-called sense of place has already become an extension of
ourselves.
Devising a garden aesthetic based on the
good health of place ultimately ensures our own good health. That
is perhaps the most selfish reason I can offer for promoting a
sense of place as the foundation for gardening in the
twenty-first century.
Why We Garden is written with much
love and faith. It is written in the hope that the discoveries
revealed to me within my garden may provoke some small
transformation in your own sense of place. As a well-known
Mexican song points out, from my house to your house is but one
small step.
~ ~ ~
Every tree and every deer has a distinct
personality. The people who build fences have distinct
personalities. Even the fences -- whether real, symbolic, or
wholly imagined -- have distinct personalities. The relationship
between all these beings and structures, each one of them
bursting with personality, seems to exist beyond the reckonings
of any logic. Scientists will never plumb the depths of this
relationship through any wile of statistical analysis. Does it
exist? Let's withhold judgment a little bit longer.
This same relationship motivates me to
recommend successful strategies to other gardeners, but not
tactics. In this case, the strategy is simple: do not treat
natural predators as a manifestation of evil. I personally regard
the relationship between gardener, predator (such as deer) and
prey (such as Russian kale) to be an important enough matter in
the development of a sense of place that I have devoted an entire
chapter to it.
Or another strategy: plant all the trees you
like and rest assured that the deer will be just as finicky in
choosing the ones he or she likes. Yet always treat that deer as
a discerning neighbor. Talk ot it! Communicate. Build a sign. An
ideogram fence. But don't build a great wall of China unless you
like running a prison camp for fruit trees. And one more
strategy: follow the tortoise's example: Plant two each of every
fruit tree you like and then sit back and watch the deer. Watch
the trees. In five years you'll know which ones the deer prefer.
In eight years the trees will have grown too large for any deer
to harm. Only five years to run a fruit-growing
experiment? Feel blessed when a hundred golden peaches start
ripening on a tree that is a mere four-year-old stripling and
takes up about the same amount of garden space as a picnic table.
Feel blessed that it's not sequoia cones we're waiting for. That
would take decades. Then again, if we're in a hurry, we ought to
consider a different hobby. Like sprinting.
~ ~ ~
As both my garden and I enter middle age,
the established beds seem ever more capable of taking care of
themselves. I have tried many different gardening fashions,
committed several monumental planting blunders, and felt
compelled to try more categories of plants than either this
limited history or the soil is able to nurture. I now find myself
looking away from the actual plants and toward the landscape as a
unity, although I am also convinced that this projected sense of
unity is as much a matter of self-deception -- smoke and mirrors
-- as it is the result of sophisticated planting technique. For
example, every place my bedrock knoll drops off toward forest or
pond offers a natural cascade of rock outcroppings, moss, lichen,
sedum, and wildflowers. A rock gardener in the Japanese style
might spend an entire lifetime trying to emulate what those
cliffs gather to themselves naturally. but whereas I once
considered the cliffs to be "wild," meaning outside my
gardening domain, a slight shift in perception now lets me regard
them as examplars of the well-integrated garden. Yet I have
planted nothing on those cliffs besides a few scattered
hen-and-chickens. And more tampering would simply cause one or
another of the three constrainsts (time, money, or resources) to
rear its ugly head.
This sensibility for wild areas is an
example of the Findhorn notion of always leaving one area in a
garden as a natural sanctuary. Consider it safe ground, sacred
ground, and an homage to the biota that preceded the garden.
~ ~ ~
Define the basic shape of the herb bed, till
it to the depth of a garden fork, and deposit a few large rocks
for effect. Start out by planting a couple of chive plants, a
Greek oregano, maybe a French lavender, perhaps a bergamot for
the bees and butterflies it attracts. Definitely add a Russian
sage (Perovskia) and an agastache if you can find either
one.
Or here's a final herbal tip for gourmets:
if you cook Thai food but can't find a steady supply of lemon
grass, go to an oriental market and buy some fresh lemon grass
with the roots still attached. Plant them right in the ground
under the same conditions you'd plant basil. Step back and watch
them grow. Northern gardeners should bring the plants inside the
house in October, and watch them thrive as houseplants. If you
are unable to locate lemon grass with the roots still attached,
try planting the hardy lemon thyme. It makes a fair substitute,
and a wonderful ornamental besides.
And get yourself a good herb book, or you're
still missing half the fun of starting an herb museum. Several
are mentioned in the endnotes of this chapter. Rodale's
Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs and The Herb Book
by John Lust area among the best. Give a copy to your favorite
doctor.
~ ~ ~
This sense of the sacred was seamlessly
integrated into all aspects of the lives of traditional peoples.
A person immersed in a sacred life not only comprehended
the sacred as a wellspring of order and meaning, but ate it,
tread upon it, breathed it. We are, by contrast, largely the
children of a materialistic worldview that attempts to provide a
parallel sense of order and meaning to our lives by withholding a
sacred worldview.
That may be one reason the modern English
language is currently so inadequate in words describing the
spiritual bond that connects people to place. This book, for
instance, employs four distinct words to name this relationship: a
sense of place. Standing on its own, the word sense
certainly offers little acknowledgement of the sacred. Likewise,
we Westerners tend to utilize the words sacred and spiritual either
tenuously or at least restively. Here are two words that are
meant to signify a human being's most profound relationship to
the universe, yet we seem to have gone out of our way to
obfuscate our own personal perception of this linkage by adding
an opaque layer of theological connotations.
...
...anyone seeking a prototype upon which to
develop a modern sacred sense of place can find no
better example than the spiritual worldview lived by, for
instance, the Lakota, the Okanangan, or the Inuit. Environmental
psychologist James Swan writes: "In Western Society, of one
talks to God, it is called prayer, but if God talks back to
someone it is symptomatic of psychosis. In contrast, among the
Inuit and other Shamanic cultures, if spiritual voices do not
come to one's mental ears then one is considered mentally
ill."
...
The sacred garden is the place we go to
contemplate our own two souls of heaven and Earth. Although we
plant flowers and vegetables there, the sacred garden is better
understood as the place we plant our feet. It could be a quiet
corner we visit to sit and admire a tree. In that sense of sitting,
and not necessarily doing, people like the nongardening
Lakota emerge as our mentors in the cultivation of this garden.
Obviously, our deepest constructs about the
garden need alteration if they are to serve us in such an exalted
way. This depiction of a garden not bound to tasks like digging
soil, planting flowers, and harvesting fruit goes far beyond the
classic European view of what a garden is. Then again, the
Japanese raked garden has little to do with digging, planting,
and harvesting and yet no one would suggest that the Zen monks
who tend it are not gardeners.
At any rate, of all the gardens in this
book, the sacred garden lies the furthest from the traditional
European garden. It is certainly not about the control of nature
for aesthetic purposes. Nor does it follow any specific garden
design. To know it we may first need to discover the place where
gardening intersects with pimaatisiiwin, intersects with
making medicine, with svaha, feng shui, and all the
other ideas human being have accumulated throughout history
to express a sacred relationship to place.
If there is to be a deep ecology, then there
must also be a deep gardening. It involves deep hoeing, deep
digging, deep planting, deep harvesting, deep sitting, deep
listening ... deep interacting to natural processes. These tasks
should be familiar by now because we have already visited this
garden under another guise. The sentient garden earlier
demonstrated that a garden need not be passive, the mere
recipient of our labors, a predefined object waiting to be
assembled. It is instead, active, a thing capable of assembling.
It possesses a co-creative, interpenetrating aspect that
dynamically links human beings to place. Because the sentient
garden is a place where "voices come to one's mental
ears," it flirts with the mystical even as it endorses what
the Inuit refer to as health. Visiting this garden makes
medicine.
--You may read more about Why We
Garden and order the book at http://www.sentientpublications.com/catalog/garden.php