Gardens have long been spaces of leisure and places of contemplation; solace from a busy life and a busy world but the act of gardening seems to be seen merely as the means to the end to most, as opposed to an integral part of the salvation it offers once “finished”, once finessed and made it’s most beautiful.
People appear surprised when I tell them that gardens are not only calming, and even healing to spend time sitting in or picnicing in or strolling through but rather, the creating of and the tinkering in. It seems to a great number, to just be a lot of work and it can be, there is no doubt about that but it is a worthy sweat to break and the benefits are many. Even the simple act of smelling flowers, let alone picking them or growing them, has been shown to alter our mental state considerably and for the better in mere seconds, as the saying goes, “Take time to……”. Now imagine how good it would feel to make a whole garden filled with them and have nurtured them to bloom.
We live in a time when all feels hurried. I mean, this is not to say all life hasn’t been busy, mankind has never sat idle, the business of surviving has always been an involving task but I doubt that life has ever felt so frantic in the day to day. The overloading of information from so many sources and our ability to do everything so quickly, thanks to the great surge of technology, has made life a whirlwind and all of us, impatient and eager for instant gratification. It is designed this way and so I turn to the making of this garden to cycle back the clock, put my patience into practice because gardens, and doing them yourself, takes time and lots of it. It can be frustrating if you forget to remember, there is no real rush as it will never really be “finished”, gardens never are and I wonder if that is because as the gardens grow, so too the gardener and it becomes a synchronised partnership in evolution.
I have loved the community of gardeners that social media has opened our world up to and even non-gardeners but rather those who love a country life or watching a project unfold, as was the case with Life at Little Oak Farm over in Insta Land and now, The Garden at Moorfield here. However, despite having our gardening journey and our custodianships of old farmhouses shared online for all to follow, I am an intensely private person and I can be extremely pensive, perhaps because my life had been a rather plagued one from a young age, plagued by the complicated and often harsh world of adult problems, unprotected.
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