Gardens of the Spirit: Create Your Own Sacred Spaces

Gardens of the Spirit:
Create Your Own Sacred Spaces

by Roni Jay

Now you can create a bit of heaven on earth by arranging and tending a garden that fosters spiritual renewal and provides earthly enjoyment. No other spot better lends itself to reflection, relaxation, and peace. Build a tranquil Japanese Zen garden, an Oriental teahouse, an Italian Renaissance garden, medieval herb garden, and more. Just follow the detailed blueprints and instructions in this gorgeous, full-color volume.

Do you have a vision of heaven on earth?

Ever wonder how you could bring that vision into reality?

If so, then Gardens of the Spirit is for you. Now, don't let the title fool you. It is not about fertilizing your soul or spreading beauty bark around your heart; it is a detailed and practical guide for setting up a wide variety of beautiful and functional botanical gardens.

The author gives seven major examples of traditional gardens: Taoist gardens, Zen gardens, Islamic gardens, Medieval gardens, Italian Renaissance gardens, English Knot gardens, and Healing gardens. Taoist gardens follow the philosophy of Lao Tzu's "Simple Path." They include unobtrusively though carefully placed flowers, rocks, trees, and waterways. They are designed as "a resting place for the eye as well as the body," and many of the ornaments (such as pagodas) and flowers have symbolic significance. Zen gardens are a bit of a paradox. They are artistic representations that strive to exactly imitate nature.

Zen gardens are designed as places for spiritual contemplation and include small evergreen trees, ground-level greenery, rocks, a very few humble flowers, and waterways that flow in natural patterns. Some Zen gardens also include raked gravel, but this is as close to the appearance of artifice that one will see in them. Islamic gardens often complement major architectural structures, but one need not have the Taj Mahal to construct one. The Islamic garden is much more systematized than Taoist or Zen gardens, with carefully placed gazebos, trees, plants, and shrubs. Such gardens often divide a piece of land into four even squares to represent the quadripartite universe issuing from the center of divine power. Medieval gardens are even more structured, for they were originally temporary havens for the people of a plague-ridden Europe.

Whereas Taoist and Zen gardens "flow," like the Islamic garden, the Medieval variety is based in carefully plotted straight lines: conscientiously placed boundaries, paths, and square flower beds that serve as an ordered comfort in a disordered world. The Italian Renaissance garden is, if not the most intricate, at least the showiest of all the gardens. In these gardens, artifice is flaunted. Usually set on a hillside, they include stairways, elaborate paths, carefully patterned flower gardens, mounting statuary, and complicated fountains or water devices. If the Zen gardens are intended to pacify with their natural patterns and colors, the Italian Renaissance gardens are meant to stimulate with their rich beauty and brilliance.

The English Knot gardens are by far the most intricate of the gardens, made up of painstakingly contrived shrubbery that is made to form designs as labyrinthine as the imagination and the flexibility of plant life will allow. These designs are usually contained in a surrounding square shape of hedge, giving them a certain order, and they are best placed in view of the manor's (or A-frame's) upstairs window.

Healing gardens are based on the original, which was cultivated by Mount Vernon, Oxfordshire physician Edward Bach. Dr. Bach realized that concentrations of certain herbs can heal or treat a great many physical complaints and was the first great homeopathic doctor. There is no particular arrangement of one's healing plants, but there are certain herbs that are believed to be most beneficial for those born under given astrological signs, so that a Taurus might wish to plant ample supplies of lovage, mint, and thyme. It must be noted at the last that, as elaborate (and expensive!) as some of these gardens sound, they can be scaled up or down, almost as much as one wishes or can afford.

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