All of nature is willing to talk and work with us. The question is: are humans?
I, for one, talk with nature, with the beings most people don’t consider to be alive like we are, let alone able to speak with us. Including our gardens.
Some years ago I decided to take over the neglected gardens at my condo, which included wild space on a steep hillside out back and dying or badly overgrown plants in our public, street-side face. I spent a lot of time researching garden design, appropriate plants for our area (Seattle is considered rainy, but the microclimate I live in is windswept, salty, and dry), and finding a gardening company to do all the work.
I’ve grown house plants for years. In the 10 years I lived in Michigan I had a hundred house plants, from miniature roses to an 8-foot plumeria tree that I grew from a cutting I bought in a garden shop in Hawaii. Today we live with a 50-year-old jade tree called Raymond, for my father, who started him from a small cutting. Raymond is so big I built a stone floor to support him. He acts like he’s an oak tree, spreading his peaceful aura over my dogs and cat, who sleep under him. He’s even patient with the cat, who climbs up his sturdy branches to pose like the lion king as she surveys the street outside.
We all notice and appreciate gardens, even if we’re just watching our dogs pee on them (not allowed at our house). It wasn’t until I decided to manage our condo gardens that I took a really good look at what I was seeing.
I was astonished. The pesticides, the brutal shearing, the simple destruction of a plant ‘that isn’t working anymore,’ or a rush for the newest plant made me conclude that gardeners might just possibly be the people most hostile toward nature. Why is that?
I’ll explore it in future posts.
Here’s a story about a great gardener, someone both intuitively and practically tuned into her garden, which includes a small creek and mature fir trees. She asked me to look at a newly planted tree that was not thriving. As I stood considering it I heard a deep voice say, “Turn around.”
I turned: the voice belonged to a large Douglas fir tree across the street in a neighbor’s yard, in a direct line from where I stood.
“And again,” the tree said.
I turned back and saw another fir tree, possibly a quarter mile away. I was standing directly in their energetic path. The trees wanted the struggling tree moved into a direct line with them, several feet from where it was planted. They were creating a large protective space to shield the gardener as she developed her garden and, as it turned out, her own intuitive abilities and an interest in herbalism.
The gardener didn’t agree with the move, so the tree stayed where it was: the gardener had chosen it for a wet spot, and insisted it stay there. The tree has done well, showing nature and people can compromise and work together.
But we learned something more that day. I noticed that, despite being planted in a wet area, the tree was drought-stricken. I looked closer. The gardener had done what most people do: planted the tree and kept the area around it bare. To keep the weeds down she’d tucked a weed mat on top. The weed mat was suffocating the plant.
I yanked it off. The owner objected, but the ground beneath it was bone dry.
I’m an intuitive, right? So nature itself told me what that meant. Black plastic and weed mats block the energy that comes from wind and rain, and so the plants and the land they’re on suffocate. They don’t get the energy that comes from the rain that falls on them and the sun that shines, which is different from the soil they may be growing in, and groundwater. Honest. Simple. Stunning.
The gardener and I both did double-takes on that. The tree got watered and the weed mat was banned. Today the tree is healthy.
The lesson? Anxious to be great gardeners and still have a life we resort to time-saving measures, like pesticides and herbicides, black plastic and weed mats. But nature has a different perspective.
Pesticides and herbicides we know about: a lot of damage to the plants, to the land, and to us from indiscriminate use of chemicals. But the simple time-savers like weed mats will also kill our plants and, by extension, possibly us.
Really, our environment is everything. So what do we do about it? How do we respond to nature? Can we start taking small steps that will get us all to the same place at the right time—to a healthy, balanced planet? What does that look like? What do the guardians of nature have to say?
These are some of the issues I’ll be exploring in this column. But for right now, what one step can you take in your garden that will allow the energy of nature itself into it?
(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz