Healing Gardens

Cultural Perspectives on Gardening

I believe that my own perspective on gardening has changed drastically over the past few years. As a kid, I spent much time playing in the huge garden that my grandmother kept (and still keeps) in her backyard. Also, my mother has always kept gardens at all of the houses in which we have lived over the years, and both of my parents have always taken pride in maintaining an aesthetically pleasing yard. As a result, I always thought of gardening as merely a hobby and a recreational activity. In a larger cultural context, I was aware of farms that existed to produce food, but as I lived in souther California I was not exposed to much nature, or many types of gardens until I moved to the Northwest. Over the past few years my mother has taken up an interest in organic gardening and and what she has learned and shared with me has sparked my interest in gardening as well. I think the modern US mainstream probably has a similar perspective on gardening to me as a child- "gardens are places where you plant flowers and shrubs to make the yard look nice". I am not aware of the perspectives my ancestors had on gardening as this is not a question I have ever really even considered. This is probably because I already know such a limited amount about my ancestors, so lacking an understanding of their cultural perspective on gardening is just one more way that I am out of touch with my ancestry. I am not aware of very many ways in which gardens and gardening are viewed within different cultural contexts, and I believe this is because gardening is not central to or even a major part of my culture. I think that gardens and gardening are deemed of greater importance in cultures where people are dependent on their own or a neighbors garden as a source of food, or in cultures that follow specific gardening traditions that have been passed down through the centuries.

What Types of Gardens are There?

The types of gardens I came up with were: Herb gardens, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, residential gardens (those people keep around there homes). mediatation gardens, forset gardens. rose gardens, zen gardens, nursery or commercial gardens. However, I also am still struggling to be able to define exactly what a garden is, and more specifically, how are we to differentiate between a farm and a garden? Does it depend on the intent of the person/people caring for the plants? Does it depend on how one uses the produce?

Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Wisdom

I have recently been reading The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock, who first proposed the Gaia hypothesis. In The Earth's blanket, Nancy Turner compares the Gaia hypothesis with the idea of the Earth's blanket, and it is easy for me to see the comparisons. Both ideas see plants as fulfilling an essential role in a larger "system" that is the Earth. Also, both of these beliefs seem to view humans the same way- not a greater species with a right to use lesser life forms as it pleases, but as merely another part of this larger living organism the Earth. Also, Nancy Turner writes about conflicting views of "wealth" and what it means to be rich, comparing our Western notion of wealth ( having a lot of money and material possessions) to many native people's notion of wealthiness as the feeling of comfort and security that comes with living on land that can provide you with everything you might need. She then explains that because we are so financially wealthy, we can afford to eat any food we desire without considering the "environmental and social cost of the food we are consuming". This is an idea that I have been thinking a lot about recently, and I do believe that much of the reason we are so careless of the resources it takes to produce and ship the food that many of us eat is because we are so distanced (both physically and in a spiritual sense), from the land on which the food was grown, and from the acts of growing, gathering and harvesting our food.

What purposes do Gardens Serve?

Gardens can serve the purpose of being aesthetically pleasing or beautifying an area. They could serve the purpose of providing food or medicine, and of course in order to serve this purpose the plants in the garden must be specific to these purposes. Gardens might serve the purpose of bringing together the community. For example, in the housing development where my parents live there is a "community pea patch" where neighbors come together to work in their gardens. Through doing this, they not only grow plants in their gardens but strengthen the "community feel" of the neighborhood, and the people in the community get to know each other better. Gardens might serve the purpose of being therapeutic or healing. An example of this was in an article we read last week in class about a women who started a project to empower prisoners and give them hope by teaching them to keep a garden.

What is a Garden?

This is a question that I have asked my self many times throughout this class, but haven't come up with an answer I am satisfied with. I guess I would say a garden is any space set aside or used with the intention of cultivating plants. I think that whehter something can be defined as a "garden" depends greatly on the intentions of the person who establishes it and cares for the plants, and on how they use the produce from their garden. It is for this reason that I have the most difficult time differentiating between farms and gardens. One factor in making this distinction is the size of the plot of land, but exactly how big does it have to be to qualify as a farm? I think that in order to distinguish a farm from a garden, one must take into account both its size and the intentions for its produce. I think that there can be gardens within a forest, but a naturally occuring forest is not necesarily a garden. Even though I can see many parallels between cities and gardens in a metaphoric sense, I don't beleive that cities are gardens. As for the question of whether the earth is a garden, I had never considered this question before and my immediate response is that it is only a garden in the metaphoric sense. However, when I consider whether "hunting ang gathering" is gardening, it is easy for me to see that if one considers the earth to be a garden ( in the literal sense), than yes, hunting ang gathering are the way that we "harvest" the produce of this garden, the earth.

Why do Gardeners Garden?

Reflecting on the many different motivations of the farmers whose stories are detailed in "Fields That Dream", it is impossible for me to even attempt to sum up the reaons that people garden. The author of the book interviews farmers or "gardeners", many of whom started our growing food for themselves and ended up selling their produce to make money, eventually coming to depend on that income for their livlelyhood. However, money is just one of the various reason that people garden. The Earth's blanket explores the ways that native people have "gardened", and while their livlihood also depends on the products of their "gardens" or land, it is not because of the money they make from it but because they use the plants directly as food, to make medicine, clothing, clothing, shelter, etc. There are also entirely different reasons that people garden. For example, in the chapter titled "second chances", the founder of the Seattle Youth Garden Works program explains that working in a garden can be healing and can teach you a lot of lessons. By participating in the program, the you recieve employment training and an education they might not otherwise receive. Their reasons for gardening are entirely different than, say, a suburban mother who tends a flower garden in her yard as a hobby.    

Are There Good and Bad Gardens?

To answer the question of whether there are “good” and “bad” gardens, yes, I do believe that “bad” gardens exist. So what makes for a “bad” garden? I believe that any garden that damages the earth it grows on is a bad garden. One good example of this is organic gardens and farms versus gardens and farms that use pesticides and synthetic and damaging fertilizers. Through a process called “carbon sequestration”, organic matter in the soil reduces levels of harmful greenhouse gases that can contribute to global warming. Fertilizers used in non-organic farming and gardening methods, on the other hand, deplete organic matter in the soil, actually releasing carbon into the air instead of trapping it. After learning about this, I was reading the Earth’s blanket and found that it actually discusses this concept. In the chapter titled “The Balance Between Humans and Nature”, Turner writes that, due to our lack of understanding of how nature and the Earth works as a system, and what our place is as humans in this system, we are doing things that are causing irreversible damage to the environment. The reasons that “bad” gardens exist usually seems to be either greed ( people desire to grow more/bigger/better plants with no regard for the damage they are causing by doing so), or , as mentioned in the book, lack of understanding on the part of the humans who cultivate these “bad” gardens.

Who Gardens?

When I read the question "Who do you know that you consider a 'gardener'?" I immedieatley thought of my grandmother. The first garden I ever spent time in was hers, and I have always, without question, considered her to be a "gardener". Though she does not depend on her garden for her livlihood, a huge part of whom I know her to be would be lost if she were to stop gardening. I think that when someone is consumed deeply enough by gardening that it becomes a major part of their identity, they are surely are "gardener". I think that a person can spend many hours of the day gardening, such as people who are payed to tend to other's gardens, but if their heart is not in the work and if they have not developed a relationship with the plants and the act of gardening, then they are merely a "person who gardens". It is quite possible for someone who beleives she or he has a "brown thumb" to become a gardener. I think the way that this happens if when someone who considers themselves to have a "brown thumb" focuses their energy on developing relationships with the plants they tend to, and by learning more about those plants. To be honest, I have never really believed in the notion that any person has a "green thumb" or "brown thumb", because I think that if anyone is willing to put time and energy in to caring for plants, they can become somone whom others might consider a "gardener".