Gardens

"You can’t garden with such will," I said as I entered the surround of the dream.

In the dream, the helpful people had bulldozed a pathway down to the garden. They stood there dumbfounded, as if to express, How could you not like our help? The path did not even follow the contours of the hill, it just went straight down. And still, they seemed shocked at my distress. How could I not appreciate their straight, steep, bulldozed path?

"Well, it’s about listening," I said. "The land needs to give some input too."

Maybe the dream was triggered by my visit to Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island. There seemed to be attendants everywhere, raking the gravel creating precise lines, picking up every leaf fallen out of place. A young attendant waving me forward to move in the right direction, with consternation that I stay on the path and not on the road, like a small child needing to control a wayward adult.

There is a directional flow: the carpark, the information centre, the sunken garden, the rose garden, the restaurant, the Japanese garden, the view of the inlet, the Italian garden, the soft serve icecream, the café, the shop, the carpark. Everywhere is manicured, the flowers grouped and blooming. I started to think about how I love things going to seed. I started to admire the bark on the trees, a leaf that someone had missed, the shadows of the plants on the pavement. I missed the scented rose after a soft rain, crumbling the leaves of wild roses to smell the apple scent. The fecundity of manure and straw, pumpkins going wild, the beauty of random weeds and plants that seem to have come from nowhere, finding they are exactly what you need.

Gardening for me is exciting when I listen and sense how a garden is structured. I love that moment when the energy shifts in what I am doing and the work flows. I love creating form and pausing to perceive how the garden has its own life force and that this can lead me. I love that the garden can meet my personality, particularly if I can give space to its expression.

And then there is the learning; observing the gesture of the plants, what they bring forward, the reflecting back, and the thoughtful consideration of soil. Perhaps that’s why I felt ill at ease in the Butchart Gardens knowing that the flowers were only there for their blooms. Once they had finished flowering they would be pulled out and replaced. Yes, I thought, I like the seasons of plants.

I was thinking too, about how we perceive beauty and how we look. I remembered the quote from Rumi:

Listen. Make a way for yourself inside yourself.
Stop looking in the other way of looking. 

A lovely thing I like to do is to wander around as if I am looking through my heart. Looking is a sensory process. I consider that when we see something we embark on a journey. That’s when we might want to hide our eyes from seeing. So here's to taking space to look in ways we don’t normally look. This makes me think about the Praying Mantis - how contemplating the Mantis I can sense another way of looking from within myself. Yes, that would be one of the essences that could transport one into another way of perceiving.

Not all the gardens I saw in Vancouver were manicured. Vancouver is a city of gardens, walking down the street one could find rows of lettuces, cress, marjoram, all manner of vegetables, herbs and flowers in small productive beds on the edge of pavements. It was an impressive sight and I wondered why more cities couldn’t produce such generous gardeners.