Why We Garden - Oneness with Nature

    Holy Mother Earth,

 the trees and all nature, are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.

~  Winnebago saying

A garden is nature, bounded  -  protected and shaped by human hands.  It can be a simple balcony filled with planters, a sweeping vista dotted with trees or a small courtyard bordered by plant beds.  

Our urge to co-create with Mother Nature has been with us since time immemorial.   This impulse lies in the need to be connected to something greater than ourselves.  

Gardening enhances a heightened sense of empathy and expands our awareness of non-human life.  When we garden, we see how the lowly earthworm is as important as the forest. 

This, in turn, leads to an oceanic feeling that we are one with Nature.  Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher, called  this expanded sense of self,   ‘the ecological self’:

^"We are not outside the rest of nature and therefore cannot do with it as we please without changing ourselves … we are a part of the ecosphere just as intimately as we are a part of our own society.." 

photo by Jan Johnsen / in garden by Johnsen

The ecological self has always been with us.  It is this self (not the  human centered self of our Western World) that created the nature based rituals and ceremonies of Native American and Australian Aborigines;  that used monumental trees or great stones as their religious totems;  that developed the pleasure grounds of the Persians and the sacred groves of the Greeks. 

 The ecological self sees Nature as a conduit to the cosmos.  As the 19^th century traveler and nature lover, W. H. Hudson, wrote in his evocative, turn of the century book, ‘The Purple Land’:

photo by Jan Johnsen / Mt Kisco, NY

“Face to face with Nature on the vast hills at eventide, who does not feel himself near to the Unseen?”