The Well Gardened Mind

As we cultivate the earth, we cultivate an attitude of care towards the world but a caring stance is not generally promoted in contemporary life. The ‘replace’ rather than ‘repair’ culture, combined with fragmented social networks and the fast pace of urban living has given rise to a set of values that devalues care. In fact, we have moved so far f

We are not primed to dis-attach, we are primed to seek reunion.

Like other artistic endeavours, garden making can be a response to loss. Creating a garden can be as much a re-creation as a creation; an idea of paradise, something that connects us with a landscape we have loved and which compensates us for our separation from nature.

Working with plants gave him a feeling of calm because as he put it: ‘there is something more honest about plants compared to people’.

For the Benedictines, gardening was an equaliser and nobody within the monastery was too grand or too learned to work in the garden for part of the day. This was a culture of care and reverence in which the gardener’s tools were to be treated with the same level of respect as the vessels of the altar. It was a way of life in which the body, mind an

the notion of place in contemporary life has increasingly been reduced to a backdrop and the interaction, if there is any, tends to be of a transient nature, rather than a living relationship that might be sustaining.

However much we are distracted by the neon lights and drawn to the city’s humming, thumping energy, somewhere in the deep ancestral recesses of our minds an alarm bell rings, signalling to us this is not a good place to be.

Put simply, people behave better and connect with one another more when they are in the presence of plants and trees.

‘It’s like I have a calm place in my mind now,’