A garden built to reflect the balance of nature in our daily lives and the model for a proposed intentional community.
An Essay by Yardbird
Modern culture is out of balance with nature. In fact, I’d say most people in today’s modern culture have a dysfunctional relationship with nature. This is a consequence of people’s separation from truth. The philosophy garden, as I see it, is a system to observe and winnow the grain of truth by living and experiencing life through its daily processes. We transform ourselves through the correspondence between our inner self and aligning our perceptions with our observed experiences in nature.
The philosophy garden has its roots in the Taoist philosophy of China. There, the imperial families built gardens to reflect the balance of nature in their daily lives. They envisioned the garden as a series of rooms that offered a different vista and a new perspective around every path.
“The Chinese garden is a landscape garden style which has evolved over three thousand years. It includes both the vast gardens of the Chinese emperors and members of the imperial family, built for pleasure and to impress, and the more intimate gardens created by scholars, poets, former government officials, soldiers and merchants, made for reflection and escape from the outside world. They create an idealized miniature landscape, which is meant to express the harmony that should exist between man and nature.”
There is a simple beauty and truth to the system of correspondence in nature. The four elements of earth, air, water, and fire, represent aspects within ourselves that correspond to the process of transformation. The earth represents the starting point of base matter. The next higher elemental form is air, representing active mental processing associated with the intellect. Water is the sacred feminine aspect of emotion, our spiritual guidance system. This is how we develop holistic intelligence, when the water aspect is combined with air.
If we want growth we need earth, air, water, and fire. This is tillage, we work upon the earth element in order to develop and grow. Our compassion, is ultimately our watering and nurturing of growth. The element of fire brings together the other elements such that they are brought forth into action. This is the higher aspect of our soul, or inner sun. There is a fifth element also, a quintessence that binds the others, and this is the ether. Ether is the spirit, and it represents the underlying life force that reaches its full expression. Spirit is potentiality. Physical is experiential.
The great work facing us is to find a way to heal the dysfunctional relationships of modern culture. Applying the laws of correspondence to these relationships provides a method of living and being that can transform them. But what does that system look like in real life?
I think there is an opportunity to incorporate elements of the traditional philosophy garden, through the modern context of a prairie garden homestead where I live in northeast Kansas. I’ve spent several months with philosopher/gardener Joe Hollis, of Mountain Gardens Herbs and he has some wonderful insight into these systems of living. This is a vision written by him, but modified by me, an improvisational riff on his great work. It looks something like this:
Once upon a time there was, or will be, a small community of persons who shared a goal: to create a philosophy garden, develop it, maintain it, live in it, enjoy it.
It is an entrepreneurial garden homestead on five acres of Kansas prairie. The homestead was originally a dairy built in the 1920’s, the main buildings consisting of a two story barn and cape cod farmhouse. There is an established fruit orchard, with apples, pears, cherries, peaches, and apricots. We make wine from the Norton grape, the Cabernet of the Midwest. Mead is made from an old mulberry tree at the front of the house, hard cider from the apples. Fermentation is a part of life, transforming juices from fruit into nutritious drinks, perfectly preserved for winter.
Herbs for the kitchen and for making medicine are abundant; there is bronze fennel, horseradish, licorice root, goldenseal, calamus, black cohosh, bee balm, and mints of all kinds. Brown, green, and blue bottles of tinctures line a shelf in the kitchen. A small garden shed overlooks the annual vegetable garden… weeds taking over the edges and filling in the bare spots not yet planted. Dexter cows can be seen grazing in the cool early morning, and late evening, and escaping from the afternoon sun in the shade of a willow. It is a vision of pastoral and garden beauty, but it is limited by the number of people living and working here. Two sets of aging hands only go so far. What we really need are some free ranging humans to live and work here, taking responsibility for various aspects of the homestead. An opportunity to transform this place into a thriving ecosystem, tapping its, and our, full potential.
There are areas of responsibility: vegetable, herb and fruit gardens, natural buildings, water systems, nursery & seed collecting, kitchen & food preservation, bees, mushrooms and more. The fellows know what they are responsible for. Whatever they need is provided, including help (apprentices) and guidance (elders), tools, materials, texts.
On a typical morning, everyone (apprentices, fellows, elders) will be working together in one part of the garden: planting, weeding, harvesting, pruning, propagating, fertilizing, grubbing, labeling, terracing, mulching, and so on. On a typical afternoon, the fellows and elders are engaged with projects in their own domains; the apprentices assist where needed. The apprentices rotate between helping in all the sectors, and in the course of a year come to understand how it all works, learn where everything is kept, how to anticipate and deal with the usual problems, how to distinguish the garden plants and the weeds, and what to do with each. Apprentices are provided room & board (board means groceries – everyone shares in the food preparation); at the end of the year, apprentices may be invited to return as fellows.
Fellows receive room & board, and the opportunity to earn income either by taking on a pre-existing ‘business’ or by starting a new (garden-related) one. Examples would include: selling seeds, seedlings, plants, produce or value-added products, marketing information, landscaping, promoting workshops & tours, etc. Fellows may also, if they wish, construct their own shelter using primarily materials available on the land—clay, stone, wood—or improve an existing one.
The garden has its own income stream, which provides whatever food we (thus far) can’t grow ourselves, tools, materials, books, utilities, truck, and so on. Everyone pitches in to help in the garden; that’s part of the morning shared work. But the garden also affords an almost infinite number of other entrepreneurial opportunities to generate an income, and it is these opportunities which fellows are encouraged to explore. Activities could include beekeeping, mead/beer making, fermenting, poultry processing, incubating eggs, blacksmithing, cheesemaking, soap making, etc. An expected outcome of this program is that participants will leave with not only a thorough knowledge of a specific ‘product’ and indeed an established ‘business’ to generate enough to survive (and hopefully a little extra to thrive). The ideal would be create a network of these interconnected homesteads and relationships.
A prerequisite for apprentices is a desire to acquire basic gardening knowledge and experience. Fellows are expected to have considerably more experience. The best and most natural way to become a fellow is to be an apprentice here for a year and then, by mutual agreement, move up to become a fellow the following year(s). As indicated above, fellows will choose (or be assigned) areas of responsibility (vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens, kitchen, apothecary, structures, water system, etc.) Individuals with considerable garden experience plus the necessary specialized knowledge and experience may move directly to fellowship.
This is a small community, say six to twelve adults. There is much interaction and camaraderie. I can see the prairie garden as a place for art, music, and lively culture. There is a shared interest in philosophy gardening and commitment to the development of a way of living on earth that is sustainable, democratic and satisfying. Sustainable means beneficial to the ecosystem. Democratic means beneficial, or at least not stealing from, our fellow humans. Satisfying means beneficial to our health and contentment.
“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”
Wendell Berry – The Long-Legged House (1992)
Beyond health and contentment, the personal goals of philosophy gardening are harmony and enthusiasm. With harmony comes the peace and contentment which follows from having a certain knowledge of the world and one’s place and role in it. Enthusiasm (Latin ‘inspiration’) refers to freeing the ‘God within’ to act. Not just at occasional periods of creativity, in the studio, or worship, in church – we seek to infuse our lives with enthusiasm: to wake in the morning, the God within eager to engage with the world, the God without. To live in a garden, in the company of enthusiastic gardeners….
This is the philosophy garden. A natural outdoor laboratory to incubate and realize the potential of the homestead ecosystem.
Listen to more on Thriving The Future Podcast Ep. 39: