To me maintenance feels like a chore. It’s something you have to do, but it detracts from all the things you could be doing. But there’s another way of looking at maintenance. You are keeping something alive. In this sense you aren’t simply maintaining. You are gardening. The Garden and Desire A garden is a…
There seems to be something in the human heart that longs for a garden. Perhaps a garden is an analogy for wholeness. Maybe it’s something more. We are stardustBillion year old carbonWe are goldenCaught in the devil’s bargainAnd we’ve got to get ourselvesback to the garden Joni Mitchell – Woodstock This devil’s bargain, at least…
A study by Texas A&M found that interaction with plants and green spaces had demonstrated benefits across six quality of life constructs. The paper gathers research on an even broader array of benefits, including: One of the undelying focsuses of the paper is how green space can be incorporated into architecture and ubran design in…
Having a connection to green space can have powerful benefits for one’s physical and mental health. For instance, patients with a view of nature have better outcomes than patients with a view of a wall. Interaction with plants can help to improve all six quality of life areas: Because of these benefits an increasing number…
Anne-Laure Le Cunff observes that the French have a phrase cultiver son jardin intérieur – or caring for your interior garden. It’s a way of saying that the mind is like a garden. There is more to the comparison than simple metaphor. The garden is one of humanity’s oldest creations. And there seems to be…
We tend to see a garden, even a vegetable garden, as being a little slice of nature. But a garden is entirely a man-made structure. The choice of plants to add to the garden, and the choice of the plants and animals to keep out of the garden, are all done by design. When done…
When our desire moves us to make something, we begin to naturally start assembling bits and pieces into a kind of order. It doesn’t matter what we are working on, a piece of writing, a painting, a piece of furniture. There is an ordering process that is common to all creative works. The easiest place…
