Gardening For The Soul

Why am I writing this blog?  Well here I am, attempting to live my life to the fullest, to experience it all, to uncover what’s going on for me, to learn and grow on my journey.  Deep down inside, I believe that many other people want the same.  So my hope is that by sharing my experience, sharing my thoughts and sharing my vulnerabilities, others will feel liberated to do so, too.  And through our connections, we get to shine a light on each other, down into those deepest corners where the cobwebs have gathered and we sometimes dare not look.

So why the gardening, too?  Well, apart from being English and therefore having a sense of cultural obligation, I feel that the outer growth of my garden reflects the inner growth of me – who I am and how I operate in this world.  Having landed in this house in 1994, my affair with the earth started.  I brought gardening books and plants and just stuck them in in the hope that they would grow.  Of course they did not and in the end, I found a woman who had just started her own gardening business to help me begin my adventure.  She built a plan and I followed along.  I had this dreadful fear of the garden not being right, of picking the wrong things that wouldn’t go well together.  I so admired the gardens I saw in magazines – they seemed so perfect and that’s what I wanted.  Interestingly, no matter how many people I hired to help me and no matter how much reading I did on the matter, my garden grew very haphazourdly.  I wanted to be attracted to neat plants that always maintained their shape (or at least did in magazines!) but I seemed to be attacted to airy, fairy type things that got battered from the elements.  And still I worried about it not looking perfect.  I’d sit outside on a beautiful summer’s day and see all the things that were wrong.  Poor Steve was endlessly frustrated when I’d cajole him into sitting outside with me and then I’d disappear off to fix some imperfection I had just noticed!   Gradually though, as I got more accepting of myself, so I become more accepting of the garden I was growing around me.  Now I don’t worry as much that something won’t look right – I release my head from the experience and pick plants from my heart, things that appeal in both color, look and smell.  Now I can literally sit and smell the roses. 

And that is what I want for this blog.  As I am striving to discover who I am, I want to free others to take their journey, for each of us to find the garden growing within.