Gardens
by Steyn Viljoen · updated 3mo ago
Gardens
Following this logic, our brains reward a kept garden because it staves off wilderness, because in the wilderness there is death, and thus by keeping nature controlled and orderly, we keep death away.
Landscape maintenance is, therefore, an exercise of fear.from Landscape Maintenance and the Fear of Death - Wonderground
Steyn Viljoen added 4mo ago
Gardening offers an endless supply of these kinds of "neutralizers for perfectionism," as Lamp'l called them. He confessed to being a perfectionist himself and knows firsthand that "pursuit of perfection is a waste of time—especially in the garden. So don't bother!"
from 10 Mental Health Benefits of Gardening by Psychology Today
Steyn Viljoen added 3mo ago
- In 17th century France, the monarchy expressed its royal, God-given prowess through the total subjugation of natural ecology. Wilderness was reduced to clipped hedges, topiary, seriality and flatness. All hail king boxwood.
from Wilderness and Garden-Making, Post-Internet - Wonderground
Steyn Viljoen added 5mo ago
- As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mi... See more
Steyn Viljoen added 5mo ago
- And this is crucial to our talk here, because these abilities – to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening.
Steyn Viljoen added 7mo ago
- Gardening is not just a set of tasks. It’s not restricted to backyards, courtyards, balconies. It can, and should, happen anywhere, everywhere. Gardening is simply a framework for engagement with our world, grounded in care, action and intimacy with place. To garden is to care deeply, inclusively and audaciously for the world outside our homes and ... See more
from Audacious Gardening: On Daring to Care by Wonderground
Steyn Viljoen added 7mo ago
- A chief gladness of gardening comes from its dual nature, from how it salves our longing for making order out of chaos but also frustrates it. There is elemental satisfaction in the reminder that we can never fully control nature — that, in fact, any sense of control is a childish fantasy, for we ourselves are children of nature, made by the selfsa... See more
Steyn Viljoen added 5mo ago
- To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be signi... See more
Steyn Viljoen added 5mo ago
Like the tiger, we dream of the savannah, the rainforest and the mangrove swamp. We want to hunt and fuck and bask in the sun. We want to climb trees and drink from freshwater streams. We want to pursue our true calling and live to our full potential. I believe this desire is in every one of us. And when it’s suppressed long enough, we rebel. Somet
... See morefrom A Call to Rebellion: A New Story About Depression by Jonathan Carson
Steyn Viljoen added 7mo ago