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Living Healing Gardens: Breathing life

Whoosh! Holi,the Hindu festival of colour from holi celebration of color

“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ~ Khalil Gibran

The Earth yearns for each and every one of us. This post is about the transformation, restoration and renewal of our relationship to our community, our environment, our landscape, our home, our spirit. Ah, it is so healing and grounding to get back in tune with the soil & soul of the earth. Let’s nourish our souls from the ground up with:

Artful, soulful, spirited wild gardens

Gardens are healing places, lush environments that feed body, mind, and soul; they are much-needed pockets, moments, and offerings of vitality. The idea of the garden as a place of contemplation is beautiful, but a little useless if it fails to participate in the cycles of life. Most homeowners make use of their backyard to build elegant gardens which they use as their relaxing space. Beautiful backyard furniture can also be installed, with white steel fences (that can be made with the help of fence builders Edmonton) in the background for property protection.

We need more awareness to create gardens beyond decor. Gardens with purpose, like nature, intended. There has been some hesitation in the design world slowly experimenting with native and edible plants for fear that they would look rough, primal, or ugly. I think we are learning that they express, transmit, and offer another kind of beauty, the real kind, one that embraces aging, decay, death, rebirth, and regeneration. Moreover, these gardens also need regular maintenance, which the property owner could see to. It may take professional assistance such as from Tree Surgeon Watford (or elsewhere) to ensure that trees and plants in your backyard grow healthy to provide you with all the benefits that a garden has to offer.

Have no extra space? Walls, roofs, abandoned parks can be transformed into life giving places, breathing rooms for wildlife, spaces that feed us whole. A little bit of effort towards these spaces, with assistance from helpful professionals for a roof leak repair in Greenville, or to fix a broken wall in Forest Park, could be the secret to this transformation. If the whole community came together for the upkeep of public spaces and add greenery to them, it could breathe whole new life both into the people as well as the places.

Imagine a person walking on the garden pavement (probably constructed by stamped concrete Augusta GA or elsewhere) one morning, just picking an apple from the trees growing beside the sidewalk; or a child stopping to gaze at a beautiful flower, filled with wonder. What if these bountiful gardens helped people less than others, to feel the magic in freshly picked fruits and vegetables? Imagine if we could turn both the water-consuming manicured lawns that offer very little support to the biodiversity of life of suburbia and the neglected spaces of the city into sustainable edible gardens, lush green spaces; from barren to life-giving, from monochrome to full of radiant colors. Think bountiful, delicious, pesticide free, organic, at your fingertips, sun ripened fruits of the earth. Wildlife in your backyard, roof yard, wall garden.

How we treat the earth, the seeds, and the food we eat affects our consciousness. I love that we are cross-pollinating and blurring the lines to actually reaveal the continuum between seemingly disparate fields in an interdisciplinary fiesta: agriculture + urbanism, design + nutrition, and more…

Sanctuary for life

“The passion in the earth’s whisper grew so loud I woke.” -Meister Eckhart

I have always had a passion for gardens as real places and symbols of our inner life–see Make Space for Joy. I miss my secret garden of my childhood, where I first experienced creative intimacy with nature, sculpting the earth with my hands. While I admire the clarity of the zen garden, the flowing nature of the Chinese garden, the structure of the French garden, the intelligence of the Pre-Columbian garden, the whimsical nature of the Italian garden, the loveliness of the wild gardens of Berkeley; it is the primal nature of the Amazon rain forest–Earth’s natural garden that made me feel the deepest sense of reverence.

I feel a collective yearning to restore space for wildlife, for gratitude, for the healing of our environment and ourselves. Blessings to all the beings that graciously cultivate Mamapachita, this magical land, this kind and fiercely feminine Earth. May we experience our relationship with her in a sacred way, every day as Earth day. May we feel the flow of love in her heartbeat bringing us into deep remembrance. May we offer and receive her fruits as medicine.

Edible wall by Go Green Gardeners via AT

Athenaeum Hotel, eight-story forest by Patrick Blanc

French botanist Patrick Blanc designed this vertical wall for Caixa in Madrid Spain. “It was installed on an exterior wall of a former power station, which was renovated by famous architects Herzog & de Meuron. The garden and the building have been braving the pollution, hot sun and elements for four years and are doing well in this …urban oasis.”

Grace Restaurant, Adaptive Reuse by Sander Architects, is “sheathed in a vertical garden, using edible plants. Passers-by will literally be able to pick fruits, vegetables, and herbs from the building.”

I love these beautiful cottages nestled against the hillside, beautifully integrated within the landscape. Architects note: “Green roofs are heavier than normal roofs, so you have to build a structure more stoutly. We don’t take our green roofs lightly in earthquake country.” Feldman said.

“The rooftop’s seven undulating green hillocks pay homage to the iconic topography of San Francisco and blurs the boundary between building and parkland..The more typical black tar-and-asphalt building rooftop leads to a phenomenon called the ‘Urban Heat Island’ effect. The endless swath of black rooftops and pavement trap heat, causing cities to be 6 to 10 degrees warmer than outlying greenbelt areas. One-sixth of all electricity consumed in the U.S. goes to cool buildings. The Academy’s green rooftop keeps the building’s interior an average of 10 degrees cooler than a standard roof would. The plants also transform carbon dioxide into oxygen, capture rainwater & reduce energy needs for heating and cooling.” The Living Roof Garden was designed by Rana Creek for the San Francisco Museum of Sciences

“Our goals are to inspire our community, gather together to grow our own food, and to rehabilitate our local ecosystem.” “It’s Not a Fairytale, it is the first edible public park in Seattle grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild…”

Resources

Do you live in the SF Bay Area? Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco supplies a variety of modular panels and hanging pockets for large and small walls that can be planted with decorative or edible plants.

Parick Blanc is the author of The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City (Revised and Updated). From the article “No space? Go with a vertical garden tapestry:”

Such striking, artful “murs vegetals,” as Blanc calls them, are comprised of plants grown on two layers of water-retaining polyamide felt attached to 1/2-inch-thick plastic shields affixed to a metal scaffold that allows air to flow between the building wall and the vertical garden. They emulate natural “gardens” on cliff walls and mountain slopes that are fed by sunshine, wind energy, ambient moisture, trickling dew and rain..Blanc’s wall gardens also require little but consistent care…He is developing ways to create rooftop rain-fed reservoirs to make an even more sustainable ecosystem.

Edible Landscaping by Rosalind Creasy. Here is an article on Rosalind Creasy, where she is described as one of the trendsetters in edible landscaping. Creasy has been edible landscaping her suburban home in Los Altos, California, giving talks & helping design edible landscapes for more than 25 years.

From the founders of landscape design firm Star Apple Edible & Fine Gardening in the San Francisco Bay Area comes The Beautiful Edible Garden, teaching how to artfully incorporate organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs into an attractive modern garden design, artfully blending edibles and ornamentals together.

The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-Less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden by Soler offers step-by-step instructions for converting all or part of a lawn into an edible paradise; specific guidelines for selecting and planting the most attractive edible plants + ornamentals.

Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with Nature, not against her, which results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. For urban and suburban growers.

Dear ones, I’m excited to collaborate with beings of all realms for this healing vision.

“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth.” ~ Rumi

With love,

Edgewalkers of flow

There is a good thing on top of that mountain. I will make a straight line for it.” But the archetypal way is not like that; it is a serpentine way that wriggles and spirals its way to the top. We often feel defeated by it and brought to a standstill. It makes most people…