Gardens
When it comes to established environments that serve the needs of as many people as possible, experts agree that public parks are the closest we have to an ideal third place. Parks are preferably welcoming to all members of the community for a variety of activities; they ideally have bathrooms, water fountains, and cooling tree cover; they’re free... See more
Try to make something perfect and it will remain imperfect. Do it naturally and it is always perfect. Nature is perfect; effort is imperfect. So whenever you are doing something too much, you are destroying.
Osho • Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living)
A garden, much like a home, is a blunt, bare-faced extension of the human beings who control it. If you are the caretaker of a piece of land, that piece of land will inevitably come to embody your behavioral and cultural values, albeit in an abstract sort of a way.
Garden Anarchy in L.A. - Wonderground
To be a gardener is to give a fuck. To be a gardener is to be invested in a place—to know it, to protect it, to be present to it. How can we protect and heal ourselves and our planet if we’re not willing to step into, and value, the role of the gardener?
Georgina Reid • Audacious Gardening: On Daring to Care - Wonderground
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication… The effects of nature’s qualities on health... See more
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!"
Psychology Today • 10 Mental Health Benefits of Gardening
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... See more
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.
“I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains,” the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in the dawning years of the twenty-first century, “but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically.”