Children are fascinated with digging in the earth. It is a process of discovery, finding what lurks beneath the surface, the strange creatures that live there and the comforting texture of the material they live in. It’s fun to hold the soil and examine it, to touch it and feel its cool contents fall between the fingers, a stuff both ancient and as new as last autumn’s decay. It is hard for those of us who live above the soil to imagine life in this dark place.
But digging is also a process of creation, molding the earth into new shapes--carving a valley and building a hill with the excess, as I sometimes did as a child, creating a primeval landscape for my plastic dinosaurs. These miniature landscapes could be the setting for endless battles and more than the normal number of volcanoes. Other dig to create memoirs, burying meaningful objects for their future selves or future generations to discover.
And then, of course, there is the cultivation that begins with digging. Children and adults alike are fascinated by how the simple act of putting a seed or seedling in the ground can lead to a fruit, vegetable, flower, or tree. It should not be surprising that gardening holds a central role in our lives as a practical, everyday activity that rewards so many people not just with products, but with a feeling of well being that provides balance to their lives. Gardening is so embedded in our lives that it even serves as a metaphor for mind (cultivating and planting ideas, burying and uncovering memories, etc., see Coda below) and as providing lessons for living a good life (hard work, patience, attention to detail, delayed gratification, etc.). Cultivation of plants and the modification of landscapes, large and small, are a primal activity for human and animal minds. Ants and other insects mold the earth to make their sometimes extremely complex colonies, and cultivate fungi to feed their populations. Fish and crustaceans cultivate algae and bacteria to enhance their feeding grounds. Beavers build dams that last more than 100 years to do the same. The growth of complex human civilizations is a direct result of their ability to master cultivation to create a stable food supply. Humans are at least partly distinguished by their propensity for cultivation.
All cultivation can develop into an aesthetic experience, but gardening holds a special place. Usually, we think of “gardening” as different from farming--not as a job, but as a craft, avocation, or pastime. Gardening is usually conducted more for its aesthetic qualities than for income and sustenance. The backyard vegetable garden, yielding a few dozen tomatoes and a few squashes, is justified more by the pleasure it brings the gardener and the rewards of the taste of fresh food. Gardens are places created for the experiences that we can have there, and the best of them, such as the ones found at Versailles or Jardin Majorelle, are called works of art.
In his writings on aesthetics, Immanuel Kant linked formal gardening to painting, considering gardens as a visual art, focused on creating scenes that give pleasure in the colors, textures, and spatial relations of their contents. But gardens have a temporal dimension as well, perhaps even dramatic qualities, as plants and their leaves and flowers change throughout the season, or as their soil and stones accumulate snow or change tone under the rain and changing light. Barwell and Powell (2010) liken this dimension to music, with its overlapping rhythms and melodies:
For example, an oak tree grows slowly, its leaves grow and decay relatively quickly, a drift of crocuses underneath the oak appears and disappears at a different rate, and a surrounding lawn is managed so that it looks the same all year round. Such a combination of plants affords visual interest, but at the same time it creates a complex rhythm of life cycles, growth, and decay that may interest, excite, calm, disturb, or reassure an attentive visitor.
For those lucky enough to revisit a garden multiple times during the year, or to cultivate their own, gardens generate a different experience over time than can occur on a single visit. And if the garden is sufficiently large, even a single tour through it may generate a similar effect as one passes from one sub-garden to the next, or as the perspective changes from different viewpoints. I walk the same Jardin Botanique in Geneva at least 3-4 days each week, and the 30-minute path I take offers many changes. Even if the path has become predictable and the walk mostly a meditation, it affords evolving visual rewards, like a pleasant, familiar melody.
More than just visual beauty, research shows that visiting and viewing gardens, and vegetation in general, offer mental health benefits that cannot be attributed simply to beauty, as broad as that concept is. The experience of natural environments mitigate fatigue, calm the mind, improve cognitive function, stimulate creativity, and improve mental disorders, such as depression, attention deficit disorder, and alzheimer's. Perhaps as much as beauty, we have a craving for natural environments embedded deep in our psyches.
However, what I am most concerned with here is the experience of the gardener, the fruits of the process. Considering the criteria for an aesthetic experience described in previous posts, gardening seems to hit all the bases with exceptional ease. The planting creates an immediate tension (in the pleasant sense) that draws us into the drama of survival and potential flourishing. This tension is further driven by the anticipation of growth and beauty. The process of gardening is touted as good physical and mental exercise because it requires deep engagement with immediate actions and sensual details. Gardening is hard work, and rewarding in and of itself, without constant regard for its extrinsic purposes. Finally, gardens offer a natural conclusion or resolution, a blossoming that rewards the gardener for all the effort, and these rewards can be ongoing, lasting years. In fact, a garden can be an ongoing aesthetic experience, running through this cycle on multiple scales in multiple evolutions, like a never ending piece of music.
Coda
Consider this aphorism, drawn from a letter to a friend:
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero was not speaking of two different forms of nourishment, for mind and for body, but a common form of nourishment that is supported by their mutual presence.
You open a book (or a digital tablet), hold it in your hands, scanning the contents for its potential rewards. Your fingers turn or swipe the pages, your eyes burrowing, digging, at times pulling and tossing the weeds to focus on the promising sprouts. You take in the words, digesting the images, ideas, and emotions they arouse. They bring you down to earth to confront the common ground, or up toward the sky for a treetop view. Reading cultivates the mind, works like a hoe to weed and refresh spaces for growth, sowing seeds that may grow to fruition in experience. Gardening does the same, both literally and figuratively.
The connection between reading books and gardening is a lasting metaphor. This connection is at least partly because the book and the garden are themselves useful metaphors for mind. Today, reflecting our current state of technology, we tend to see the mind as a computer, with its information processing and storage capacity. But the garden and book metaphors still hold power. Like the best of minds, a productive, healthy garden and a well written book are valuable repositories that require cultivation, and which can involve all the senses and emotions in the process. They are also much more than repositories, they are engines for growth, in all the ways described above.
------------
Barwell, I. & Powell, J. (2010) Gardens, Music, and Time, in Gardening--Philosophy for Everyone: Cultivating Wisdom (Ed., Dan O’Brien). Wiley-Blackwell, UK.
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| Photo by Shyn Darkly, Creative Commons 2.0 |
And then, of course, there is the cultivation that begins with digging. Children and adults alike are fascinated by how the simple act of putting a seed or seedling in the ground can lead to a fruit, vegetable, flower, or tree. It should not be surprising that gardening holds a central role in our lives as a practical, everyday activity that rewards so many people not just with products, but with a feeling of well being that provides balance to their lives. Gardening is so embedded in our lives that it even serves as a metaphor for mind (cultivating and planting ideas, burying and uncovering memories, etc., see Coda below) and as providing lessons for living a good life (hard work, patience, attention to detail, delayed gratification, etc.). Cultivation of plants and the modification of landscapes, large and small, are a primal activity for human and animal minds. Ants and other insects mold the earth to make their sometimes extremely complex colonies, and cultivate fungi to feed their populations. Fish and crustaceans cultivate algae and bacteria to enhance their feeding grounds. Beavers build dams that last more than 100 years to do the same. The growth of complex human civilizations is a direct result of their ability to master cultivation to create a stable food supply. Humans are at least partly distinguished by their propensity for cultivation.
All cultivation can develop into an aesthetic experience, but gardening holds a special place. Usually, we think of “gardening” as different from farming--not as a job, but as a craft, avocation, or pastime. Gardening is usually conducted more for its aesthetic qualities than for income and sustenance. The backyard vegetable garden, yielding a few dozen tomatoes and a few squashes, is justified more by the pleasure it brings the gardener and the rewards of the taste of fresh food. Gardens are places created for the experiences that we can have there, and the best of them, such as the ones found at Versailles or Jardin Majorelle, are called works of art.
In his writings on aesthetics, Immanuel Kant linked formal gardening to painting, considering gardens as a visual art, focused on creating scenes that give pleasure in the colors, textures, and spatial relations of their contents. But gardens have a temporal dimension as well, perhaps even dramatic qualities, as plants and their leaves and flowers change throughout the season, or as their soil and stones accumulate snow or change tone under the rain and changing light. Barwell and Powell (2010) liken this dimension to music, with its overlapping rhythms and melodies:
For example, an oak tree grows slowly, its leaves grow and decay relatively quickly, a drift of crocuses underneath the oak appears and disappears at a different rate, and a surrounding lawn is managed so that it looks the same all year round. Such a combination of plants affords visual interest, but at the same time it creates a complex rhythm of life cycles, growth, and decay that may interest, excite, calm, disturb, or reassure an attentive visitor.
For those lucky enough to revisit a garden multiple times during the year, or to cultivate their own, gardens generate a different experience over time than can occur on a single visit. And if the garden is sufficiently large, even a single tour through it may generate a similar effect as one passes from one sub-garden to the next, or as the perspective changes from different viewpoints. I walk the same Jardin Botanique in Geneva at least 3-4 days each week, and the 30-minute path I take offers many changes. Even if the path has become predictable and the walk mostly a meditation, it affords evolving visual rewards, like a pleasant, familiar melody.
More than just visual beauty, research shows that visiting and viewing gardens, and vegetation in general, offer mental health benefits that cannot be attributed simply to beauty, as broad as that concept is. The experience of natural environments mitigate fatigue, calm the mind, improve cognitive function, stimulate creativity, and improve mental disorders, such as depression, attention deficit disorder, and alzheimer's. Perhaps as much as beauty, we have a craving for natural environments embedded deep in our psyches.
However, what I am most concerned with here is the experience of the gardener, the fruits of the process. Considering the criteria for an aesthetic experience described in previous posts, gardening seems to hit all the bases with exceptional ease. The planting creates an immediate tension (in the pleasant sense) that draws us into the drama of survival and potential flourishing. This tension is further driven by the anticipation of growth and beauty. The process of gardening is touted as good physical and mental exercise because it requires deep engagement with immediate actions and sensual details. Gardening is hard work, and rewarding in and of itself, without constant regard for its extrinsic purposes. Finally, gardens offer a natural conclusion or resolution, a blossoming that rewards the gardener for all the effort, and these rewards can be ongoing, lasting years. In fact, a garden can be an ongoing aesthetic experience, running through this cycle on multiple scales in multiple evolutions, like a never ending piece of music.
Coda
Consider this aphorism, drawn from a letter to a friend:
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero was not speaking of two different forms of nourishment, for mind and for body, but a common form of nourishment that is supported by their mutual presence.
You open a book (or a digital tablet), hold it in your hands, scanning the contents for its potential rewards. Your fingers turn or swipe the pages, your eyes burrowing, digging, at times pulling and tossing the weeds to focus on the promising sprouts. You take in the words, digesting the images, ideas, and emotions they arouse. They bring you down to earth to confront the common ground, or up toward the sky for a treetop view. Reading cultivates the mind, works like a hoe to weed and refresh spaces for growth, sowing seeds that may grow to fruition in experience. Gardening does the same, both literally and figuratively.
The connection between reading books and gardening is a lasting metaphor. This connection is at least partly because the book and the garden are themselves useful metaphors for mind. Today, reflecting our current state of technology, we tend to see the mind as a computer, with its information processing and storage capacity. But the garden and book metaphors still hold power. Like the best of minds, a productive, healthy garden and a well written book are valuable repositories that require cultivation, and which can involve all the senses and emotions in the process. They are also much more than repositories, they are engines for growth, in all the ways described above.
------------
Barwell, I. & Powell, J. (2010) Gardens, Music, and Time, in Gardening--Philosophy for Everyone: Cultivating Wisdom (Ed., Dan O’Brien). Wiley-Blackwell, UK.
Nice Pat :)
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