City people, nowadays, seem more than ever dedicated to their gardens, allotments, outdoor spaces and public plantings. Gardening is fruitful, productive work. One must be watchfully calibrating the effect on the earth and the flora of sun, moisture, animals, other plants, blooming and dying. Harvest is a joyous and surprising time. And held within the ritual of harvest is the promise of the following year, a new year, a new generation of nurturing bounty.
Gardens feed us in every way: through fragrance and smell, colour, taste, sound, texture, shape, and chemistry. The awareness of levels of existence and the interaction among the elements – what Stanley Kunitz calls an ‘exchange between the self and the atmosphere’ – is integrated into the body, mind, brain, breath, and spirit when entering a garden, a forest, a field, even a city park. Gardening is a life practice, because although we tend, stimulate, rearrange, and design, we can’t control growth or any other outcome.
A garden is safe, contemplative, harmonious, evocative, protected, rich, and complex. It’s symbolic of inner cultivation. There’s often a hidden entrance, a surrounding wall, a pond or well, rocks, overgrown areas and open vistas. Paradise lost and paradise regained. In the East, the garden is a familiar subject of paintings and poetry, always with a lesson to teach, a message to deliver.
You miss the garden because you want a small fig from a random tree…
Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.
– Rumi
Don’t go outside your house to see the flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursions.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.
-Kabir