Growing better
Growing better
A garden should have a name. And a concept, a reason for being. And a design.
I know of a garden place that ought to be called Dante's Paradiso.
A resident has her eye on a certain site for an aromatherapy garden - a place for rest and healing in the ocean of difficulties around us.
There's been a suggestion for a "pizza garden". From a little distance it might look, say, like a pizza with everything - circular beds for pepperoni, flowers laid out in lines to look like slices, maybe with one pizza slice missing as an entrance for the garden. Everything in it would be edible - tomatoes, oregano,...and if it was my pizza garden it would be growing hot peppers, because I'm crazy for hot pepper. And garlic. That would make one helluva pizza.
Everything changes. We can take advantage of this by enjoying imagining good things happening. Later, we'll actually accomplish those happy things by grabbing at each little chance to make them real. A future garden site may be a total wreck right now - filled with rocks and other things you can't see the use of at the moment. But pick that rock up and move it somewhere you like better and your garden's begun. You won't finish today, but little by little all those rocks and other stuff can be carted off or used to build something you want.
When Michelangelo made sculptures he first saw what he wanted, as if it were already in the stone or whatever he was carving; then he chiseled everything else away. This guy Adam Purple in New York City took a community garden in the Lower East Side (which was a slum at the time) and went wild with it. A picture of it was in Newsweek. Seen from the surrounding apartment buildings, the Garden of Eden community garden was absolutely gorgeous, with different color flowers and herbs in each bed, the whole thing laid out in a giant spiral. You can read and watch a video about the Garden of Eden, which is gone now, at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BygHjTKqz7c
and
http://www.nycreligion.info/garden-eden-213215-eldridge-street-series-god-nyc-gardens/ .
I was there when there was just piles of bricks and railroad ties for garden beds and three huge compost bins. This guy Purple was, "crazy" enough to see something of beauty in a falling down side of Manhattan with terrible problems.
Like creating gardens (one action at a time), community meetings may not seem to be accomplishing much. You'll surely hear skeptical comments by those not yet willing to buy in to future hope. But the good side of knowing that nothing in this world lasts forever is that the essence (if not all the specific details) of your dream CAN become real - IF you keep talking about it and working on it.
One idea that came up at a recent meeting was to build a garden in the shape of a "crop circle". Regardless of whether you believe some of these designs that appear (usually in farm fields) are created by intelligence greater than human (I do), there are thousands of stunningly attractive shapes to choose from.
Our living world is so full of "accidental" beauty. Once you fall in love with a place and start to see all the plants and animals and bugs and birds and other wildlife in and passing through it as family, your garden will already be growing. And you already have a myriad of helpers - all the living things already in the area, most of which can be "tamed" - made friends with...with, of course, a LOT of compromise.
The essence of a great dream can come true, but there's usually no getting there directly. You have to dance around the problems and talk to people and talk to yourself and adapt your ideas to synch with others' and do one thing at a time and...In the end your garden may not look at all like what you had originally envisioned. But it will be beautiful.
Jim McCue
412-421-6496
A garden should have a name. And a concept, a reason for being. And a design.
I know of a garden place that ought to be called Dante's Paradiso.
A resident has her eye on a certain site for an aromatherapy garden - a place for rest and healing in the ocean of difficulties around us.
There's been a suggestion for a "pizza garden". From a little distance it might look, say, like a pizza with everything - circular beds for pepperoni, flowers laid out in lines to look like slices, maybe with one pizza slice missing as an entrance for the garden. Everything in it would be edible - tomatoes, oregano,...and if it was my pizza garden it would be growing hot peppers, because I'm crazy for hot pepper. And garlic. That would make one helluva pizza.
Everything changes. We can take advantage of this by enjoying imagining good things happening. Later, we'll actually accomplish those happy things by grabbing at each little chance to make them real. A future garden site may be a total wreck right now - filled with rocks and other things you can't see the use of at the moment. But pick that rock up and move it somewhere you like better and your garden's begun. You won't finish today, but little by little all those rocks and other stuff can be carted off or used to build something you want.
When Michelangelo made sculptures he first saw what he wanted, as if it were already in the stone or whatever he was carving; then he chiseled everything else away. This guy Adam Purple in New York City took a community garden in the Lower East Side (which was a slum at the time) and went wild with it. A picture of it was in Newsweek. Seen from the surrounding apartment buildings, the Garden of Eden community garden was absolutely gorgeous, with different color flowers and herbs in each bed, the whole thing laid out in a giant spiral. You can read and watch a video about the Garden of Eden, which is gone now, at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BygHjTKqz7c
and
http://www.nycreligion.info/garden-eden-213215-eldridge-street-series-god-nyc-gardens/ .
I was there when there was just piles of bricks and railroad ties for garden beds and three huge compost bins. This guy Purple was, "crazy" enough to see something of beauty in a falling down side of Manhattan with terrible problems.
Like creating gardens (one action at a time), community meetings may not seem to be accomplishing much. You'll surely hear skeptical comments by those not yet willing to buy in to future hope. But the good side of knowing that nothing in this world lasts forever is that the essence (if not all the specific details) of your dream CAN become real - IF you keep talking about it and working on it.
One idea that came up at a recent meeting was to build a garden in the shape of a "crop circle". Regardless of whether you believe some of these designs that appear (usually in farm fields) are created by intelligence greater than human (I do), there are thousands of stunningly attractive shapes to choose from.
Our living world is so full of "accidental" beauty. Once you fall in love with a place and start to see all the plants and animals and bugs and birds and other wildlife in and passing through it as family, your garden will already be growing. And you already have a myriad of helpers - all the living things already in the area, most of which can be "tamed" - made friends with...with, of course, a LOT of compromise.
The essence of a great dream can come true, but there's usually no getting there directly. You have to dance around the problems and talk to people and talk to yourself and adapt your ideas to synch with others' and do one thing at a time and...In the end your garden may not look at all like what you had originally envisioned. But it will be beautiful.
Jim McCue
412-421-6496
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 8:32 AM
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