Steyn Viljoen

I have been afraid of trees. I have felt the Earth as my enemy. I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth. I aggrandized my alien identity and wore... See more

“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.”

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... See more

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.

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”